


Slender: However Improbable

by philalethia



Category: Sherlock (TV), Slender Man Mythos
Genre: Case Fic, First Time, Horror, M/M, Mild Gore, Post Reichenbach, Science Fiction, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:11:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philalethia/pseuds/philalethia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six months after The Fall, John is falling apart. Then a homeless woman is thrown from the roof of St. Bartholomew's; a tall, thin man in a black suit begins follow him; and John slowly realises that both he and Scotland Yard are very, very out of their depths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Believe in Sherlock Holmes

**Author's Note:**

> I'm borrowing a bit from the indie PC game [Slender](http://www.parsecproductions.net/slender/) and the upcoming commercial release [Slender: The Arrival](http://www.slenderarrival.com/), both of which I highly recommend. In this story's world, the Slender Man mythos exists, but the games do not.
> 
> Also, the layout of 221B (and 221A and 221C) in the show is baffling to me, so I've sort of... imposed my own layout on it.

_Before you do anything foolish, you would do well to remember that I have access to avenues which are closed to you. MH_

_To request assistance is not to admit weakness. MH_

_No. SH_

*

Every time John passes by one of the many murals which have begun to permeate London in recent months, and which have garnered enough media attention to nearly rival Banksy, he can’t help but wonder what Sherlock would make of it. If he’d shake his head at his own popularity; make unsavoury deductions about the (ex-)readers of John’s (now defunct) blog; or perhaps just scowl at the pieces of graffiti that feature his image, which is little more than a caricature—a Sherlock Holmes with a long, hooked nose, wearing the hat that he so hated and peering through a large magnifying glass.

John suspects that, whatever his reaction to the rest of it, Sherlock would allow at least his lip to curl a moment in pride at the words themselves, which are often loud centrepieces of the murals but sometimes written in minute letters amongst a mess of other, sometimes inexplicable words and symbols.

With the less conspicuous ones in particular, John always feels compelled to, as he does now, pause on the pavement and trace the tiny letters with the middle and index fingers of his left hand. (His right, meanwhile, grips the handle of his cane as a drowning man would clutch the hand of his saviour.)

_I believe in Sherlock Holmes._

He’s aware of the car idling across the street, which has been tailing him since he left the surgery not quite four minutes ago. If his pace begins to slow too much, he knows, or he relies too heavily on his cane, the car will stop beside him, open its door, and drive him back to Baker Street.

Mycroft dispensed with subtlety weeks ago. Not so much surveillance anymore, but a deterrent. Big Brother is watching, John Watson, so don’t do anything foolish.

When people did something foolish out of grief, Sherlock tended to cast his eyes to the sky as though praying for the necessary patience to handle the tedium of human beings. John refuses to be so dull.

He traces the S of _Sherlock_ with his fingers once more, then makes himself move on.

*

When he returns to Baker Street, he finds a note taped to the door of 221: a picture of a forest, sketched in black pen on what appears to be a piece of paper from a legal pad. John peers at it for a moment. The trees are evergreens, he assumes, given their triangular shape. It is a childish drawing, or perhaps the artist just isn’t very good.

He rips the paper from the door and flips it over. The back is blank. Frowning, John crumples it in his fist.

“Everyone’s an artist now,” he sighs, and unlocks the door.

*

_Any news? SH_

_You might be pleased to know he’s ceased his attempts at dating. MH_

_Unfortunately, he’s also returned to carrying his cane, and he’s begun seeing that useless therapist again. MH_

_Not my meaning. SH_

_Wasn’t it? MH_

*

John dreams of Sherlock that night, standing on a dirt path, flicking a torch on and off as he aims its light at the rows of dark tree trunks around him.

“Obvious,” John tells his tired face in the mirror the next morning. Lost in the woods. Trying to illuminate the dark. Sherlock. Even the depths of his subconscious are dull, predictable.

Sherlock would be so disappointed in what John has been reduced to.

*

Few people text him anymore. Harry will occasionally, but she prefers to call and leave long, winding messages in his voice mail. Mrs Hudson prefers to communicate face to face, and everyone else—his mum, his mates, his acquaintances—seems to prefer messages on Facebook.

So when, on a quiet Tuesday morning only a few days after the New Year, John’s mobile phone chimes to inform him of an incoming text, he fairly falls out of his chair as he lunges for it.

It’s Greg: _Come to Bart’s ASAP. There’s something you should see._

Bart’s. Nearly three months since John has heard from Greg—they’d tried to continue their friendship, but there was too much awkwardness (on Greg’s part), too much resentment (on John’s part)—and now he’s being summoned to Bart’s.

_On my way_ , John responds.

He grabs his cane on his way out, then changes his mind on the stairs. He leaves it propped against the wall beside the front door as he runs to hail a cab.

*

_This is not the time to ignore my calls. Contact me. At once. MH_

_*_

The area in front of Bart’s has attracted a small but slowly growing crowd of spectators, and beyond them, John can see that Scotland Yard has set up barricades and marked the area as a crime scene with long lines of police tape.

He can’t define the emotion that thrums through him as he makes his way through the crowd and approaches the crime scene—fear, excitement, dread, an odd blend of the three. He knows even before he reaches the barricade, where Greg is waiting with a grim expression to escort him over, that there is a body on the pavement. For a brief, odd moment, he even believes it will be Sherlock’s.

It isn’t, of course. It’s a woman, quite young—mid-twenties, if John had to guess—her trousers and blouse tattered and stained with dirt and gore. She lies on her stomach, head turned to the side, body twisted in an impossible position. Her long, light brown hair is matted with blood, fragments of brain and bone, and cerebrospinal fluid. Shattered bones protrude from both arms and one leg—and likely her chest as well, but her position hides that from view.

It’s been ages since John’s seen so much blood. Her body had clearly not struck the pavement as… favourably as Sherlock’s had, if falling from a building could ever be considered favourable. In fact, her body is so mangled she looks almost as though she’d fallen from a greater height than just the roof of Bart’s.

She looks, John realises suddenly, vaguely familiar.

“Can I—” he asks Greg, gesturing to the body, but Greg is already handing him gloves and nodding.

“I wouldn’t have called you out here otherwise.”

John kneels, slipping the gloves on, and gently, gently, touches what’s left of the woman’s neck. The skin is cold. With a grimace, John tilts her face so he can see it better, although there isn’t really much to see—just a mess of gore with vaguely human features. Still, he realises after a long moment of considering just where he knows her from.

“She was part of Sherlock’s homeless network,” he tells Greg.

One of the few whom John had seen Sherlock actually _speak_ to—nearly a true exchange of small talk, even, one which made Sherlock’s lip curl up in a half smile afterwards—instead of simply exchanging notes, which is perhaps the only reason he is able to recognise her now. As far as he can remember, John’s only ever seen her once, and he can’t recall her name, if he ever knew it to begin with.

Greg bends down with a heavy sigh. “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

John pulls his hand away and sits back on his haunches. “Suicide?”

Greg hesitates, then shakes his head. “We’ve got quite a few witnesses. They all say they heard a woman screaming, ‘No, no, please,’ and then—well.” He gestures at the body and lets John process that for a second. “You know what day it is, don’t you?”

“Course I do,” John answers.

How could he forget? It’s the six-month anniversary of Sherlock’s death.

*

At Greg’s insistence, John agrees to go out for a pint that night at what used to be their usual pub, but Greg falls into the booth across from John nearly a half hour late, looking overworked and exhausted, and says, “Sorry, sorry. I know I’m late, and I can’t stay long either.”

Perhaps John should feel sympathetic—the case clearly isn’t an easy one—but all day he’s seen Sherlock’s body every time he closes his eyes, felt the still-sharp stab of grief, and he just wants to go home and watch telly and try to forget that six months ago he lost the best friend he has ever had.

“Then why invite me out at all?” he sighs, rubbing a palm over his face. “The Yard has my statement. I’d seen her before, but only just. I don’t even know her name. Whatever happened—”

“You think I’m here about the case?” Greg asks, seeming surprised. “Christ, what do you take me for?”

“I haven’t heard a bloody word from you in months,” John says. He means to sound angry, but his voice is flat, lacking even a spark of heat. “What am I meant to think?”

A brief silence falls over the booth, John watching Greg and Greg staring awkwardly at his hands. “Yeah,” he answers after a moment. “Yeah, all right. I’m a shite friend. But Christ, John, you look like hell. You must’ve dropped nearly a stone since I last saw you, and you look like you haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. Do you think Sherlock would’ve wanted you to—”

“Don’t,” John snaps icily. “Just don’t.”

It’s an overreaction, the desire that he’s filled with to hiss _Don’t you even say his name, not after all you’ve done to pretend you and he were never close_ ; John knows it. He knows too that Greg is right, but that doesn’t make it better. Sherlock is dead; what does it matter what he would have wanted?

John shakes the thoughts from his head. “So who was she?” he asks. “Or have you still not identified the body?”

“Well,” Greg hedges. “Technically, I’m not at liberty—”

“Oh, come off it. You texted me. If you hadn’t wanted my help, you wouldn’t have done, and I can’t help if I don’t have facts. So, again, do you know who she is?”

Greg sighs but doesn’t pretend to deliberate. “No,” he admits. “No fingerprints on file, and no one we’ve interviewed has been able to identify her. We don’t know much yet, to be honest. Still waiting on the autopsy results. With any luck, they’ll find a bit of trace evidence that can lead us to whoever pushed her.”

John can’t stop himself from correcting, “Not _pushed_. You saw the body. She was… practically mangled. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and she can’t have weighed more than—more than Sherlock. But she looked so much worse than he did. So I don’t think she was just pushed from the roof. I think she was _thrown_ off it—and by someone with a lot of strength.”

*

When John finally leaves the pub, a good hour or so after Greg, he’s decided to just take a cab back to Baker Street. He’s tired, his leg aches, and drinking on an empty stomach has left him closer to sloshed than he would be otherwise.

But when he goes outside, it isn’t a cab that pulls up beside him on the kerb, but a long black car with tinted windows. Its back driver-side door opens, and, to John’s surprise, it’s Mycroft himself who peers out instead of a member of his staff.

“If you would be so kind as to accompany me, John,” he says with a pinched smile, “I would appreciate it.”

It can’t be a coincidence: a woman in Sherlock’s homeless network thrown off the roof of Bart’s just this morning and now Mycroft himself seeking John out. It’s this thought that convinces John to step forward and slide into the sleek leather seat beside Mycroft.

The car starts driving as soon as the door closes, but John pays little attention to where it’s headed. Instead, he focuses on Mycroft, who straightens his suit with a lofty sniff like John is the one inconveniencing him.

He decides not to wait for Mycroft to speak first. “What do you know about the woman who died today? No,” he says, because the face Mycroft pulls is one of bewildered innocence, “don’t pretend you don’t understand. I may not have your IQ, but I’m not an idiot. She knew Sherlock, however distantly, and she was thrown from the roof where he—where he died exactly six months ago. What do you know?”

Mycroft merely looks at him. Searching him, it seems, although for what, John can’t imagine. Eventually, he answers, “Very little, I’m afraid.”

“Really? No CCTV footage, no information about the woman?”

“Although I am flattered by the assumption,” Mycroft says, again smiling that pinched, false-looking smile, “neither I nor any member of the British government is omniscient. The only piece of information I have which New Scotland Yard does not is her name—Margaret Wiggins—although I suspect it will not be much longer now until she has been officially identified.”

_Margaret Wiggins._ John makes a firm mental note.

“I have looked into the incident extensively, of course,” Mycroft continues, “but to my knowledge, the connection between Ms Wiggins’s and Sherlock’s deaths is entirely coincidental.”

“Then why are you here?” John asks.

“To warn you that the issue is not worth pursuing—which I knew you intended to do, of course. As I’ve been informed, Ms Wiggins had quite a long history with a number of street gangs in London. She had no shortage of enemies, and any attempt on your part to investigate her death might prove… unwise. It might be hard for you to imagine, John, but I don’t wish to see you come to any harm.”

His voice softens on the final sentence; he even sounds a little fond and wistful, as though the two of them have had any sort of relationship in the time they’ve known each other. John finds his hands clenching into fists, his jaw clenching, filled with anger at Mycroft for Sherlock’s death all over again. He forces himself to turn away and stare out the window.

“Right,” he mutters. “Course you don’t.”

They spend the rest of the drive to Baker Street in silence.

*

John had never questioned Sherlock about the particulars of his network of homeless—the number of people involved, how it started, how he kept it going—and, he realises in the morning, he consequently knows woefully little about it. It had sometimes seemed that Sherlock knew every homeless person in London by sight, and they knew him, but of course that’s preposterous. And although occasionally one person would stand out to John for one reason or another—Margaret Wiggins being the woman Sherlock held a short conversation with, and then there was the teenager who’d waggled his eyebrows and licked his lips at John, and the bearded man with the bright orange hat, and so on—he had never seen Sherlock rely on any one person twice.

So when, the morning after his conversation with Mycroft, John decides to hunt down a member of Sherlock’s homeless network, he has no idea where to begin. Venturing on foot from one part of London to the next, stopping everyone he encounters, seems not just ineffective but rude as well, but it’s the best idea he’s got.

He gets ignored, mostly, although occasionally sneered, scoffed, and sighed at. John tries to vary his wording; he goes from “Did you know the woman who just died? Margaret Wiggins?” to just “Did you know Margaret Wiggins?” He even starts to introduce himself as well, hoping it will lend him some credence. It was his blog, after all, that had helped raise Sherlock’s popularity; surely it’s not outside the realm of possibility that his name might hold some weight to someone loyal to Sherlock.

“Excuse me,” he says to a dark-skinned woman seated outside a coffee shop on Southampton Street, nearly two hours after John set out from Baker Street. She looks nearly as tired and forlorn as he feels. “My name is John Watson. Did you know Margaret Wiggins?”

She barely looks at him, and on a sudden impulse, John adds, “What about Sherlock Holmes?”

The woman arches an eyebrow at him, then stares pointedly down the street where, John sees, there’s another wall of street art dedicated to Sherlock. _I believe in Sherlock Holmes_ in bold red block letters. Then below it, in a slanted, spindly scrawl: _Moriarty was real._ It’s not been done with as much artifice as some of the other murals John has seen. The words are accompanied only by a crude drawing of a stick figure wearing a dark suit. Whether it’s meant to be a depiction of Moriarty or Sherlock, John can’t tell.

“Personally,” he amends. “Did you know him _personally_?”

“Not sure if I’m comfortable answering that question,” the woman answers. Her voice is soft and hoarse.

“I just want a bit of information.”

“No. What you’re asking for is kindness,” she says, “and kindness doesn’t get you far, mate.” She looks at him like the words should tell him more than what they do.

“I don’t understand,” John admits.

The woman casts her gaze to the sky, but continues. “You want payment for a service you haven’t provided. I’m sure your Holmes there—” She nods toward the mural. “—was smarter than that.”

_Ah,_ John realises, _of course_. He reaches for his wallet but finds in it only one crisp £10 note and a crumpled fiver. “Um. I have more,” he tries to assure the woman, who is grimacing at the notes in his hand. “If you’ll just let me pop round the—”

“It’s all right,” she sighs, hauling herself to her feet. “What I know’s probably not worth more than the fiver, really. You wanted to know about Maggie Wiggins, yeah? She hadn’t been missing long, Maggie hadn’t. Just saw her two, three days ago myself—round here, even.”

“You know what’s happened to her then?”

She gives John a look like he must be very, very dim to have asked a question like that. Shifting awkwardly, John tries again: “You knew her well?”

The woman wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. “No better than most, I expect. She’s real likeable, Maggie is—was. Not the sort of person you’d expect to… well, for that to happen to.”

“Someone told me she had a history with some of the street gangs in London.”

The woman makes a disgusted, scandalised face. “Whoever said that’s a filthy liar. She was a decent sort. Likeable, like I said, and kind.”

_So Mycroft lied_ , John thinks, utterly unsurprised. That must mean there’s something here after all.

“Do you know if she knew Sherlock Holmes?” he asks.

“Everyone knew Sherlock Holmes, mate,” the woman answers, gesturing again toward the mural. “But Maggie?” She pauses, biting the inside of her lip and watching the traffic pass in front of them. “She must’ve, yeah.”

“No,” says John, shaking his head emphatically. That had been a hesitation, he knows it; she’d wanted to say something but then thought better of it. “No, you were going to say something else just then. What was it?”

“Well,” the woman answers slowly, “this is just rumours, you understand. Stories I’ve heard.”

“I understand,” John coaxes.

“One of my old mates said Maggie was an Irregular.”

“An—I’m sorry, an irregular what?”

“They say when Holmes was just starting out that he was friendly with kids on the street. Paid them to follow suspects, dig up dirt on people, that sort of thing. Called them his Irregulars.”

“He built his network from them,” John surmises, and the woman shrugs.

“Rumours, like I said. To most of us, he was like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, Holmes was. Lots of stories, probably none of it true.”

“Right, course,” says John, but his mind is whirling. Mycroft had lied, and Maggie Wiggins might have had a stronger connection with Sherlock than John had realised—or at least a longer one. “Here.” He shoves his £15 into her hands. “Thank you. I really appreciate it, um….”

He is suddenly aware that he has just had an entire conversation with the woman without having the faintest idea of her name.

The woman, however, doesn’t seem to mind. She takes the notes without complaint and pockets them. “Yeah,” she answers with a decisive nod, sitting back down. “Good luck to you, Mr Watson.”

*

John phones Greg when he gets back to the flat and tries not to be even the slightest bit disappointed to hear that he hasn’t beaten Scotland Yard to identifying Margaret Wiggins.

“Her partner identified her,” says Greg. He must be outside, because John can hear the rush of wind through the receiver. “Gave us some information, and led us to the woman’s parents even. Although it took a bit before they’d admit to ever having a daughter, and then it was just a load of rubbish about how Maggie was a sinner and an abomination. Apparently they tossed her out in secondary school when she told them she was gay.”

It brings back ugly memories of Harry’s teenage years: the fights between his mum and dad over their lesbian daughter and then the divorce, how Harry would have been on the streets if it’d been up to their dad. “Right,” he says, voice coming out sharper than he means it to. “Anything else?”

“Maggie had been missing only a few hours. Her partner says she woke up that morning alone. Never heard Maggie get up, and said Maggie wasn’t the type to run off in the middle of the night. She heard what happened later and went straight to the Met.”

John remembers Sherlock’s body, how for weeks after he’d felt hollow and cold, and how when he’d finally broken down, he’d cried so hard his abs were sore afterwards. And he and Sherlock had been only friends. At least Maggie’s partner hadn’t had to watch Maggie fall; at least she doesn’t have that to haunt her too.

The sound of the wind cuts off suddenly, replaced by Greg sighing directly into the receiver. When he speaks a moment later, his voice is lower. “She also said Maggie was being followed.”

John perks up from where he’s been hunched over, heavy with memories, on the armchair. “Followed? By who?”

“She didn’t know. She said Maggie only caught a glimpse of the guy once, and not a very good one. She’d been complaining for weeks that she felt like someone was tailing her, watching her constantly. She described him as a ‘tall thin bloke in a black suit and red tie’ but couldn’t give any more details. Neither Maggie nor her partner had a clue who it could’ve been.”

_Westwood_ , John thinks suddenly, in a sing-song Irish lilt, but of course that’s ridiculous. Moriarty is dead; his body had been found on the roof of Bart’s the day that Sherlock had jumped. And anyway, Moriarty had been more of average height and weight, not what John would describe as a “tall thin bloke.”

That doesn’t mean there’s not a connection, though. If Margaret Wiggins was connected to Sherlock, then her death could be just as connected to Moriarty as John is certain that Sherlock’s was.

“What was her partner’s name?” John asks. He fumbles for a biro and some paper, more for the opportunity to expel some of the energy suddenly flooding his body than because he thinks he’s likely to forget any of what Greg might say. “And where can I find her?”

The line is so silent that John worries for a moment the connection’s been dropped, but finally Greg says, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, John.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, just… you know. Really, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. I’m only just off probation, and even though I could pass off calling you to the crime scene because you were—”

“Come off it,” John snaps. “You called me to the crime scene because you wanted my help, and now I’m offering help, you say it’s not a good idea.”

“And you did help,” answers Greg. “You confirmed a suspicion, which opened a whole new avenue in the investigation. So now why don’t you… I don’t know, relax, go on holiday.”

“Holiday,” John echoes. He hopes he sounds as indignant as he feels. “Are you serious?”

There’s another brief silence, broken only by what sounds like the soft opening and closing of a door on Greg’s end. “I wasn’t lying the other night, mate. You look like hell. You look sick. Maybe even worse than you did three months ago. You don’t need to get dragged into whatever this is. You need a rest, you need to move on. This won’t bring him back.”

There’s a feeling like a heavy stone in John’s throat, a dull ache in his chest, and he couldn’t speak if he wanted to.

“And I’m sorry. Like I said, I know I’m a shite friend,” Greg continues. “I’ll let you know if something else turns up in the investigation.” He hangs up without another word.

John swallows thickly, then lowers the phone from his ear.

*

Mrs Hudson comes round late the next morning as John is doing the crossword in the kitchen, a steaming cup of tea at his elbow. She is carrying a shopping bag and a small sheet of folded paper, which she sets on the table across from him.

“I found it taped to the door downstairs,” she tells him. “It looks like rubbish to me, but—” She shrugs as though to say _What do I know?_ and turns to the fridge. “I brought you some milk as well, since I noticed yours had gone off.”

This is news to John. He peers at his cup of tea, which he’d added a splash of milk to as usual. He supposes it’s good he’d still been waiting for it to cool before taking his first drink.

“Thank you, Mrs Hudson,” he says, getting up to dump it down the sink. “Although you really didn’t have to.”

“Oh I know, dear,” she answers cheerfully. She stashes the new container of milk in the fridge and then carries the old one to the sink, where she joins John in pouring it down the drain. “It just eases my mind, I suppose.”

He notices then that Mrs Hudson hasn’t just bought milk, but eggs, bread, and a new package of his favourite biscuits as well, still in the shopping bag on the counter. When the old milk has been disposed of, Mrs Hudson returns to the bag and begins putting the rest of it away.

_Good god_ , John realises, _Greg was right._ At some point he’d begun relying on his landlady to do his shopping and throw out his milk when it’s gone off; he’s fallen to Sherlock-levels of self-sufficiency, and he doesn’t even have genius as an excuse.

“Let’s have lunch,” he announces on impulse. “We’ve not been to Speedy’s in a while, we could—” It occurs to John that Speedy’s might not be far enough from Baker Street to be truly considered getting out of the flat for a while, so he amends, “Or we could visit that place over—” He draws a blank. The only restaurants that come to mind are ones Sherlock took him to, the ones where Sherlock (and John) ate free, and those are perhaps not good choices.

But Mrs Hudson practically beams at the suggestion. “Oh, that sounds nice.”

Only after she leaves does John remember the sheet of paper she left on the kitchen table. He picks it up, unfolds it, and finds a sketch in black pen quite similar to the one he received the other day, also taped to the door. This one too is a childish picture of a forest, with triangular-shaped trees, except this time there’s a stick figure standing among the trees—a faceless man wearing what appears to be a suit. Either the man is intended to be as tall as the trees, or it’s a failed attempt at a perspective drawing.

_A tall thin bloke in a black suit and a red tie._

John sets the paper back on the table and goes to the rubbish bin, where he’d thrown the first drawing, and he finds that, thankfully, Mrs Hudson hasn’t emptied it. After a bit of rummaging, he finds the balled-up sketch, tries to carefully uncrumple and smooth out the paper, and then carries it back to the table, setting the two pictures side by side.

They were clearly drawn by the same artist. The paper is identical in size, texture, and weight, and the drawing style is the same. John thinks it might be supposed to indicate some sort of progression—first an empty forest and then a man in the forest—but beyond that, nothing stands out to John.

If Sherlock were here, he’d surely be able to spot at least half a dozen clues and relevant details, but John squeezes his eyes shut and tries to shake the thought from his mind.

In the end, he tapes the two sketches above the mantel so he can drag the armchair over and stare at them, glimpse them in his peripheral vision as he goes about his daily life in the flat. He thinks that, if Sherlock would have for some reason not been able to immediately spot any clues, he would have done the same thing, which makes John feel strangely better.

It makes it a bit easier to budge the whole thing—Maggie Wiggins, the tall thin man in a suit and tie, the pictures, Sherlock—to the back of his mind when he leaves for lunch with Mrs Hudson.


	2. Upon the Stair

_You cannot truly be so incompetent. SH_

_How the British government can function, when you with all your resources cannot locate a single man, is a mystery. SH_

_Contact me at once. MH_

*

“You look well rested today.”

“Hm?” says John, looking up from his shoes to Ella, his therapist, who is jotting down a note on her notepad. John has to concentrate very, very hard on not trying to read it upside down. “Oh, er. Yes. I slept well last night.”

“No nightmares?”

“No.”

“Oh, good,” says Ella, seeming quite genuinely pleased. “That’s wonderful.” She jots down another note, and John makes himself look away, out the window where a patch of sun has finally managed to break through the late-morning clouds. “How does that make you feel?”

“Dunno,” he admits. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

He’s been thinking about the sketches, mostly, and Maggie Wiggins. He thinks about trying to find the homeless woman he’d spoken to and asking her about Maggie’s partner, then trying to find her. Then sometimes he goes through spells where he tries to stop himself from thinking about any of it.

“You seem to have something on your mind,” Ella says, peering thoughtfully at John.

On one hand, he thinks, he appreciates having weekly therapy appointments; it’s an opportunity to talk to someone about whatever he wants to, and it will—theoretically—help him. On the other hand, he worries that if he really speaks his mind—tells Ella, for instance, any of his fledgling theories about the connection between Maggie, Sherlock, and the notes left on his door—she might think he’s gone off his trolley and try to talk to him, again, about medication.

He decides to aim for a safe middle.

“I saw Detective Inspector Lestrade the other day,” John says. “He wanted my opinion on the Yard’s newest case. The, um, the homeless woman who was thrown off the roof of Bart’s.” He waits for her to nod to indicate she’s heard of it before continuing. “It’s, well, reminded me, I suppose. I’ve thought a lot about Sherlock.”

“Thought what exactly?” she asks.

John inhales deeply and licks his lips uncomfortably. “He used to tell me that I saw but never observed. Well, he said that about everyone, really, but, um. I’ve been thinking that I still don’t understand why he did it, and I’ve been wondering if there were clues that I missed. You know, if there were a long string of signs I saw but never observed that would make sense of everything.”

If Ella suspects that John is speaking about more than just Sherlock’s suicide, she doesn’t show it.

*

As he’s leaving after his appointment, John takes his phone from his coat pocket to double check the time and finds that he has a text from Greg, sent nearly an hour ago.

_Thought you should know_ , it reads, _there’s been another one. Come to NSY when you get the chance._

*

John finds Greg in his office, looking harried.

“By ‘another one’,” John says, “I assume you meant another murder.”

Greg nods. “Pushed off the roof of St. Bart’s Hospital, just like the last, except this time witnesses only saw the body falling. They didn’t hear the victim screaming or pleading.”

“Unconscious or already dead?”

“Already dead. That’s part of why I’m not still at Bart’s and why I didn’t call you there.” Greg picks up a file on his desk. “If you thought Maggie Wiggins’s body looked bad…. We’re still waiting on the forensics report, of course, but this one looks… well, almost like it’d been hit by a train and then dragged a mile or so before it was taken to Bart’s and thrown off. Thankfully, we were able to get a print off the left hand and the victim’s fingerprints were on file.”

Greg passes the file off to John and continues talking while John begins to rifle through its contents. “Rhys Kinlan, arrested in 1999 for selling Class A drugs. He was released in 2005 and had been living in a small flat in East London since 2006. Does he look familiar?”

The police photograph shows a thin, pale man with close-cropped hair, probably in his late thirties or early forties. His face isn’t a bit familiar to John, nor is the name Rhys Kinlan.

“No.” When Greg appears faintly disheartened by the answer, John adds, “But that doesn’t mean that Sherlock didn’t know him.”

“No,” Greg agrees, although his expression doesn’t change in the slightest.

John takes one final, long look at the file in his hands, trying to commit as much of it to memory as possible, then passes it back to Greg. “I suppose the Yard didn’t find any trace evidence on Maggie’s body?”

Greg accepts the file with a grim shake of his head. “Not a bloody thing. No unusual fibres, no skin cells, no blood or sweat—except for Maggie herself, of course. The roof was clean too. We didn’t even find sign of a struggle, despite what witnesses say they heard.”

John digests that for a moment. He sees Moriarty behind his eyelids every time he blinks. “He’s a professional, then.”

“I don’t know about that,” Greg answers. He leans back in his chair with a heavy sigh. “But clearly whoever he is, he’s very, very good.”

*

John returns to the flat feeling utterly, funnily calm even though his mind is whirling. How, he wonders, might Sherlock have known a drug dealer released from prison around seven years ago?

A case seems the obvious answer. Sherlock had, after all, been acquainted with a number of ex-convicts because of their roles in his cases, either as clients, perpetrators, or informants. And luckily, Sherlock had kept records.

(“Surely you don’t expect me to waste crucial space in my mind on every minute detail of every case I have ever worked,” he’d told John, curling his lip in disgust at the prospect. “No, of course not, they are transcribed and then deleted.”)

John strides to Sherlock’s room—or what had used to be his room, anyway—which has remained largely untouched for the last six months. He had tried once to sort Sherlock’s things, but the attempt had gone badly. He had glimpsed a framed photograph of Sherlock and Mycroft as children and been so infuriated by the sight—the proof that Sherlock had cared for Mycroft, when Mycroft had tossed Sherlock to Moriarty like a zookeeper tosses meat to a hungry lion—he’d only barely managed to stop himself from shattering the frame with a bullet from his gun.

Sherlock had kept his notes—along with relevant evidence, newspaper clippings, and so on—alphabetised in boxes jammed beneath his bed. John drags them into the room proper before he kneels down and manages to locate the Ks.

“Kinlan,” he mutters as he thumbs through the labelled dividers between cases. “Kinlan, Kinlan.”

There’s nothing. He rummages through boxes until he locates the Rs, just in case, but finds nothing under Rhys either. Presumably, then, assuming Sherlock had in fact known him, Rhys Kinlan is either a footnote in a different case—which would take him ages to find—or isn’t related to a case at all.

John scoots the boxes back under Sherlock’s bed, then stands, his knees stiff, and tries to envision where else he might find evidence of Sherlock having ever known a Rhys Kinlan.

The most likely place would be the address book of Sherlock’s mobile phone, but that’s been gone for ages. Taken from Sherlock’s body during the investigation and now probably sealed in an evidence bag somewhere at Scotland Yard, or whatever it was police did with evidence they didn’t need any longer.

“Bugger,” he sighs. He sits on the edge of the bed, takes out his own phone, and texts Greg.

_Whatever happened to Sherlock’s phone? And did Kinlan have his on him?_

If Kinlan had, of course, it’s doubtlessly as dead and damaged now as its owner.

John debates fixing himself a cup of tea and settling into the armchair while he waits for Greg’s response, but eventually deems it too much work. Instead, he inches up the duvet until he can rest his head on one of Sherlock’s pillows. The room has been unoccupied so long—and Sherlock had never used it much to begin with—that little of Sherlock’s smell still lingers in the fabric, but John feels strangely comforted just the same.

_How planned had it been?_ he wonders after a minute or so, comfort giving way to sadness as exhaustion begins to creep up on him. Did Sherlock ever lie awake here, or out on the sofa, and plot his potential suicide? How many clues had John failed to notice?

He sets his phone by his head, ensuring the sound is on, and decides that—given the day he’s had—surely no one would fault him if he had a lie-down before dinner.

*

John wakes with a start, on his side facing the door, disoriented and still horribly sleep-fuzzy. It takes him a moment to recall that he’s in Sherlock’s bed, that someone named Rhys Kinlan is dead, and that he’d been waiting on Greg to respond to his text.

It’s dark now, the only light in the room coming from the lit streetlamps outside, so he must have slept much longer than he’d meant to. He checks his phone and confirms that it is just after seven; he’s slept for over six hours. Greg still hasn’t responded.

“Christ,” he murmurs, rubbing a palm over his face, trying to drive the haze of drowsiness from his mind. What woke him then, if it hadn’t been his phone?

Then John feels it. The faint tickle at the back of his neck, like a spider beginning the slow crawl down his spine, that tells him he is being watched from behind.

From outside or from inside? It can’t be from outside, he thinks. Sherlock’s room has no window there. Must be inside then, in the space between the wall and the bed. John listens for breath, for the rustle of fabric, but hears nothing, and yet he is suddenly sure that there is someone standing immediately behind him, staring down at him.

Wide awake now, he closes his eyes and tries to keep his muscles relaxed, feigning a return to sleep while he considers his options. He has no weapons within his reach—nothing that could be grabbed easily, anyway—and hand-to-hand combat, when he has no idea who or even really where his opponent is, seems a bad idea.

Tactical retreat, then. Though he has to be sure not to alert Mrs Hudson. She’d investigate, maybe even try to come to his defence. How can he run from an attacker without alerting her? Doesn’t matter. He’ll have to try, or to be ready to protect her if he fails.

John breathes deeply, and shifts a bit to warm his muscles. To the sitting room, he decides. His cane is propped against the arm of the sofa. It should do as a weapon in a pinch.

He vaults from the bed, sparing only a brief glance behind him as his feet hit the floor before he starts to sprint through the open doorway—then stops and looks back behind him.

There’s no one there. John flips the light switch to be sure, ridding the bedroom of its shadows, and the room is empty. No one had stood between the bed and the wall, watching John sleep.

As John stands, blinking in bafflement, his phone chimes loudly from where it still sits on the duvet just below the pillow.

“ _Christ_ ,” John curses, still-pounding heart leaping to his throat at the sudden sound. “Bloody buggering _fuck_.”

He swipes up his phone and finds a text from Greg. Sent, apparently, just over three hours ago, although clearly delayed by some failure of technology.

_Kinlan’s mobile was at his flat. He had Sherlock in his address book._

Well, John thinks, that’s one less mystery at least. And he’s grateful for the distraction.

He gives the room one more long, thorough visual sweep, then leaves, shutting the door behind him.

Later, after John has himself a nice, calming cuppa, he canvasses the flat, inside and out. What he’s looking for, he’s not quite sure—scuff marks, things out of place, anything that might indicate he hadn’t imagined the presence he’d been so sure was there in Sherlock’s room.

It’s not as though John has never mistaken a dream for reality—after he’d been shot, when the infection had set it, the line between dreams and reality had been blurry indeed—but this had been different. He had been wide awake and positively certain someone had been watching him.

He even searches Sherlock’s room for cameras. Mycroft was a bit overbearing and creepy, particularly where Sherlock had been concerned, so John supposes it’s possible he’d bugged Sherlock’s bedroom.

But he finds nothing and eventually gives the whole thing up. Perhaps he hadn’t been as awake as he thought, or perhaps he had really begun to go round the twist with grief. He has a long, hot shower, then goes to bed and tries to put it out of his mind.

*

John has an afternoon shift at the surgery the following day—one of precious few, now that Ali’s maternity leave is finished—but throughout it, his mind is only half on his patients. He sees case after case of flu, interspersed with an occasional bacterial infection, and thinks about Maggie Wiggins and Rhys Kinlan.

They’d both known Sherlock, but lots of people in London had known Sherlock. Had they been killed because they knew something about Sherlock or Sherlock’s work? Because Sherlock had told them something of importance? John can’t fathom any other reason that a murderer would target two seemingly random people that had been of Sherlock’s acquaintance. And why throw them from the roof where Sherlock had committed suicide? It made John’s head spin, trying to uncover all the unknowns.

He receives a text from Greg around three which reads: _We finally got Kinlan’s mobile phone records. Most of his texts seem to be in some sort of code, but I’m fairly certain he was Sherlock’s dealer._

Then, sent a minute later: _Or one of them, anyway._

John has to close his eyes a moment, the wave of chagrin is so strong. Of course he was. Kinlan had been a drug dealer, and Sherlock had been something of an infrequent recreational user. John feels a right idiot for not having considered it before.

But why, he then wonders, would a killer target Sherlock’s dealer?

During a break in patients, John texts Greg: _Has the investigation turned up anything else?_

The reply is almost immediate: _Christ, I wasn’t supposed to be letting you in on this case._

John bristles, and has already started to tap out a nasty response when he receives another text. _Fine. Want to get a pint?_

*

Greg arrives at the pub looking wearier than John has ever seen him. His eyes are puffy and red with what John assumes is sleep deprivation, and his hair looks unwashed, his clothes untidy.

“You look awful,” John tells him, and Greg laughs weakly and answers, “Cheers.”

They settle with a couple of lagers at a table in an empty corner of the pub, although neither so much as takes a sip. It doesn’t feel like a lager sort of occasion to John, and he supposes Greg must feel the same.

“Bad day was it?” asks John.

“Well, I expect I’ll be suspended again by the end of the week,” Greg answers with a heavy sigh, “if not demoted.”

John blinks, shocked. “Because the investigation is going poorly?”

Greg makes a disgusted sound and shakes his head sharply. “There _is_ no investigation, mate. There’s just all of Scotland Yard running around like berks. We’ve got two dead bodies and not a single bloody clue why they were killed—or even how one of them was.”

“How?” John echoes. “One was thrown off a building, and you said the other was run over and then thrown off a building.”

“I said it _looked_ like he’d been hit by a train. Turns out, the damage Kinlan sustained isn’t consistent with the damage caused by a train—or any other form of transport, for that matter. In fact, the medical examiner said he’s never seen anything like it, that it was like Kinlan had been crushed from the inside out, some sort of… spontaneous human demolition. And, well, you’re a medical man, I don’t have to explain to you how impossible that is.”

John shakes his head slowly, trying to digest this. “And you expect to be suspended for that?”

“Oh, no. I expect to be suspended because I suggested we reopen the investigation into Moriarty.”

For a moment, John can’t breathe, the anger sparks and catches fire within him so quickly. That Greg should so calmly say Moriarty’s name as though he hasn’t spent the last six months staying quiet, obediently going along with the Yard’s insistence that Sherlock had been a fraud, in an attempt to save his own career, even though John knows Greg believes in Sherlock just as fiercely as John himself does, is infuriating.

“No one much liked that,” Greg says after a long silence, staring into his untouched lager.

John’s tone is icy when he asks, “Don’t you mean Richard Brook?”

“No. I mean Moriarty.” Greg raises his gaze to meet John’s, and there’s enough regret and shame in his face that he might as well have gone to his knees and begged forgiveness.

John wills the anger to recede, and after a moment it does and he can breathe again. “Moriarty’s dead. What could he have to do with this?”

“I don’t know,” Greg answers. “But Sherlock’s acquaintances, the same place Sherlock died, and not a shred of evidence left behind to point us to the perpetrator. That’s cleverness with more than a touch of the dramatic.”

“An attention-seeking genius,” John agrees. “A lot like Moriarty.”

“And Moriarty _did_ have something of a criminal empire.”

One which is likely now missing a leader, John realises. Perhaps someone is eager to fill Moriarty’s shoes.

“Christ,” says Greg, “I wish Sherlock were here.”

John’s chest aches, and he feels a lump begin to form in his throat. If Sherlock were here and it weren’t his acquaintances being targeted, John thinks, Sherlock would love it. Not just the many mysteries of the case but also that Scotland Yard is baffled, that they would be practically crawling at his feet for his assistance.

“Yeah,” John agrees softly. “So do I.”

*

It’s gone nine when John leaves the pub, still entirely sober. He’d intended to take the Tube, or at least a cab, back to the flat, but he feels restless after the conversation with Greg, and the weather is oddly warm for an early January night. So he decides to walk instead; it isn’t terribly far to Baker Street, after all, perhaps thirty minutes at most if he walks slowly.

He thinks about Sherlock, how many times they had chased or been chased through the streets of London. Then he thinks about what Greg had said, and wonders what someone from Moriarty’s empire would want with Sherlock’s drug dealer and part of Sherlock’s homeless network, or whose attention he or she had been trying to get by killing them.

John loses himself in thought for a long while, and he is nearly halfway to Baker Street when he suddenly feels that familiar slither on the back of his neck. And he’s wide awake this time, likely not imagining things; someone is certainly standing somewhere behind him, staring at him very intently.

John slows his brisk pace and considers his options. Past nine on a weeknight, the streets aren’t crowded, but neither are they empty. If he makes some sort of scene, John might inadvertently draw an innocent stranger into this mess and get them killed. Best to try and ignore it for the moment, then.

He carries on, quickening his stride again, and when he comes closer to Baker Street, he ducks into an alleyway, taking a brief detour. Or what he hopes will be a brief detour, anyway—he’ll never know London like Sherlock had. Once John’s gone far enough that the lights and noises of the main street have faded, he slows and finally allows himself a glance behind him.

He sees nothing, aside from the wheelie bin beside the building to his left, and shadows, the bits of rubbish, and old newspapers littering the ground. He can still feel someone watching him, though, and as he waits, the sound of a single footstep, followed by a quiet rustling, echoes through the alley.

“I know you’re there, you tosser,” he calls, squaring his shoulders. He should have brought his gun, he realises. Someone is murdering Sherlock’s acquaintances, so why has he left his Sig Sauer at the flat, in the top drawer of his bedside table? “You might as well show yourself.”

There is no response, not even another rustle or a footstep, and John still can’t see anyone.

“We can have it out now and get it over with,” he says, a smidge louder this time. “Or is stalking how you get your kicks?”

One of the shadows on the ground shifts, moving maybe half an inch—if he hadn’t been watching so closely, he’d likely have missed it—and John glances upward to where the moon is just peeking over the top of the tall building on his left, and sees a figure standing at the edge, staring down at him. A man, John thinks, considering the person is wearing a man’s suit and looks to be quite tall, although the person is too far away for John to make out anything of his features except that the skin of his face is pale, nearly as pale as the moon. The man seems entirely unbothered that John is now looking back, just stands perfectly still like an eerie sentinel.

A chill creeps through John’s body at the sight. This man can’t have been the person following him only a few minutes ago; else how could he have got to the roof of the building so quickly and silently? There’s not a single operative, then, but at least two, possibly more. John is outnumbered and weaponless, and thus at significant disadvantage.

“Right,” he says calmly. “You’ve made your point, mate. I’ll be off, then, shall I?”

He backs slowly away, fully expecting the man—or his as-yet-unseen partner—to pull out a gun and open fire, but the man stays still, watching, and no one else emerges from the shadows of the alley. Only when the man is a small, unclear figure in the distance does John relax enough to turn around.

The slithering sensation follows him all the way to Baker Street, but every time John glances behind him—and up at the roofs of the buildings he passes—he sees no sign of the tall bloke in the suit, nor anyone else.

There’s a note taped to the door of 221 when he arrives. It’s another sketch, this time of a tall stick-figure man standing to the right of a tree of equal height. To the right of the man, scrawled vertically in all-capital letters, it reads: _FOLLOWS_.

Unnerved—How long has this been on the door? Had the bloke in the suit and his partner followed John conspicuously just so this note would have meaning?—John gives the street one last, thorough sweep with his gaze, then unlocks the door and steps inside.

He climbs the stairs to his flat—the fifth one creaks loudly, as it always does, and the rest moan quietly under his heavy steps—as he pulls out his mobile phone and finds Greg’s name in his address book.

“John?” Greg says when he answers, after only two rings. “Has something happened?”

“No,” John lies. If he involves the Yard, after all, then he’ll have lost his chance to pursue this on his own. “No, of course not. I just realised I’d forgotten to ask you if there was any sign Kinlan had been followed like Maggie had.”

There’s a momentary pause, and when Greg answers, he sounds cautious. “Officially, no. Kinlan didn’t live with anyone, nor did he seem to have any friends he might’ve complained to about it.”

“But?” John prompts.

“But, well. When we searched his flat, it was locked, of course, but not just locked. The door had actually been barricaded by all the heavy furniture in the flat—sofa, chest of drawers, kitchen table, he’d even thrown a few lamps on the pile. We’re still not sure how he managed to leave to go wherever it was he was killed, since all the windows were locked and we couldn’t find any other way out of the flat. All in all, it seems like a clear sign that Kinlan was afraid someone was after him.”

*

The first thing the following morning, John sets off to Southampton Street, intent on trying to find the woman he’d spoken to before so he can track down Maggie’s partner, whose name Greg had finally admitted is Padma.

John makes sure he has two crisp £50 notes in his wallet, and he hopes he’ll be able to make it on time to his two o’clock shift at the surgery. He doubts Sarah would be pleased with him if he rang her up at one to say, “Sorry, can’t make it today. I’m running round London trying to find a homeless woman whose partner’s been murdered because the police might’ve missed something when they questioned her.”

But one of the many things that working with Sherlock Holmes had taught John is that sometimes the tiniest details—like the words people choose to use—can be significant. Perhaps Padma does know nothing about the reasons for Maggie’s death or the man Maggie had been sure was following her, but John would rather decide that for himself, thanks, rather than simply take Scotland Yard’s word for it.

John takes the Tube to Charing Cross and sets about locating the coffee shop outside of which he’d met the woman last time. He finds the shop easily, but the woman is, as far as he can tell, nowhere near it.

Well, he thinks, it is early in the day still, so he buys himself a cup of coffee and wanders up and down Southampton Street as he drinks it. He passes by the mural that the woman had pointed out and lets himself stop in front of it, reaching out as always to trace the S of Sherlock’s name lightly with his index finger.

Then his gaze falls on the smaller _Moriarty was real_ below the _I believe in Sherlock Holmes_ , and the accompanying stick figure, and pauses. The stick figure, he realises, looks remarkably like the ones on the notes that John has found taped to the door of 221.

Coincidence, probably—after all, how many ways are there to draw a stick figure wearing a black suit?—but it strikes John as eerie all the same.

On a whim, he pulls his mobile phone from his pocket, unlocks the screen, and selects the camera icon. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s used his phone to take a picture—all of them at crime scenes, all of them at Sherlock’s behest—and even though John knows other people have no problem standing around and taking pictures of signs and scenery and their own food, he feels like a right berk photographing a wall with his phone while people pass by on the pavement behind him. But he does it anyway; he takes close-ups of the stick figure and both pieces of writing, then a photo of the whole mural.

He feels a bit better when a younger bloke, probably in his early twenties, wearing tight trousers and a bowler hat, stops beside John and pulls out his mobile phone as well.

“Wow,” he says, “do you think they drew Moriarty to look like Slender Man on purpose? ’Cause if so, that’s quite clever really.”

John blinks. “Slender—I’m sorry, what?”

The bloke lowers his phone and stares at John as though he’s only just realised who he’s speaking to. “Just something from the internet,” he says, in a tone like John is particularly dim and needs to be spoken to like a child. “Sorry to bother you.”

Then the git returns his attention to his phone, which John happily accepts for the dismissal that it is. He rather thinks he’s had enough of being insulted for not knowing something, after having lived with Sherlock Holmes, that he shouldn’t have to suffer it any longer.

Out of curiosity, though, he decides to type “slender man” in the search bar of his mobile’s web browser. The results aren’t especially interesting—a mythical creature with a tall, slender body, no facial features, and wearing a black suit. John skims a web page, looks at a couple of pictures, and then tucks his phone away. Maybe the stick figure in the mural is intended to be Moriarty drawn to look like this “Slender Man,” although John doesn’t understand how that’s clever of the artist. But he supposes it doesn’t matter.

He finishes his coffee and continues to patrol the area.

*

_Promise me. SH_

_You have my word that I will do everything in my power to prevent him from coming to harm. MH_

_Have you reconsidered my offer of assistance? MH_

*

By one o’clock, John has still seen no sign of the woman he’d spoken to previously, and every other homeless person he’s approached instead has balked at him, despite his offer of £50. And though he considers ringing the clinic to say he can’t make his shift today and then continuing his search, in the end he goes dutifully to work.

A few hours later, he is just beginning an examination of a patient complaining of persistent dry cough and a sore throat.

“How has your afternoon been, Ms Cunningham?” he asks her as he feels the lymph nodes in her throat—quite swollen, and her skin is feverishly warm.

“Fine, Dr Watson,” she answers, sounding—despite how she must feel—rather chipper. “I was just reading about those murders in the papers.” She gestures toward the newspaper she had set aside when John came in. “Thrown from a roof, can you imagine?”

John hides a tired sigh as he readies his stethoscope to listen to Ms Cunningham’s lungs. “I know. Two people now, was it? Dreadful business.”

“Oh, have you not heard about the third?”

John pauses, then lowers the stethoscope. “The what?”

“Just this morning,” she answers with a confident nod. “I saw it on BBC News.”

As soon as she leaves, John checks his phone, but he’s had no texts from Greg, unless technology is cooperating as poorly as it had the other night.

_Another one?_ John sends.

It’s five patients before Greg responds. _Yes, and luckily this one had ID on him. Do you know a Victor Trevor, by any chance?_

A feeling like a brick sinking in his stomach forms as John taps out his reply. _Sherlock had a friend at uni named Victor Trevor._

In fact, Victor Trevor had been Sherlock’s only friend at uni, according to Sherlock, and although Sherlock had seemed indifferent and even dismissive when he had described their friendship and subsequent drifting apart to John, John had suspected that Victor Trevor had been a significant figure in Sherlock’s life. After all, Sherlock did not use the word “friend” often; he had in fact only ever ascribed it, in John’s presence at least, to John himself, the skull, and Victor Trevor.

_Bugger_ , says Greg, which sums up John’s thoughts on the situation exactly.

*

Greg’s final text— _Maybe we should talk about putting you in protective custody—_ goes unanswered. John understands that line of thinking. Maggie, Kinlan, and now Victor Trevor—the murderer is moving progressively towards people Sherlock had been close to, and especially considering the notes and his pursuers the previous night—not that Greg knows about them, of course—it’s likely that John will be targeted next.

But he’ll be more ready than the other victims had been; he knows the pattern now, at least, even if he doesn’t know why the murderer has chosen that pattern. He won’t be caught off guard, and he won’t be rendered helpless.

John leaves the surgery at half six and heads straight to the nearest Tube station. About halfway there, he starts to sense he is being watched again, which gets his heart pounding and adrenaline coursing. _Tonight_ , he thinks. _Fine then, let’s have it._

Except when he pauses on the pavement to survey his surroundings, he sees a familiar long black car with tinted windows parked across the street. Mycroft’s men, or perhaps Mycroft himself, which explains the sensation of being watched. John relaxes, his heartbeat begins to slow, and he is suddenly just a bit grateful that he has a creepy, overbearing member of the British government watching over him. It’s another thing he has that the other victims hadn’t, after all.

John takes the Tube to Baker Street, then walks to 221. He finds another note on the door, this one without a sketch, just the words _CAN’T RUN_ taking up the whole page.

“Real inventive there, mate,” he mutters, unlocking the door.

John trudges up the seventeen steps to his flat. The fifth one, as always, creaks loudly when he steps on it, and the sound echoes in the silent corridor. If Sherlock were still alive, John thinks with a sad smile, he’d be gnashing his teeth at it. He’d found the sound irritating, apparently, but not as irritating as he had seemed to find it that John knew very well that the fifth step squeaked but could never be bothered to avoid it.

John will tell Greg about the notes, he decides. He should have done days ago, really. Maybe the Yard would have sent a plainclothesman to keep watch over the flat, and they could have caught the bastard by now and saved Victor Trevor, if not Rhys Kinlan as well.

He’s reached the top step and opened the door to 221B when there’s a loud wooden creak behind him.

John turns, not entirely sure what he is expecting to see, but it certainly isn’t the extraordinarily tall, slender figure that he finds standing on the fifth stair—with disproportionately long arms, wearing a black suit and red tie, nothing but smooth chalk-white skin where a face should be.

John doesn’t scream. Even in the moment, he’s quite proud of himself for that feat. He’s somewhat less pleased at the scrambling, stumbling sprint he breaks into, slamming the door behind him as he flees into his flat and up the stairs and into his bedroom, throws open his bedside table and seizes his Sig and sits on the floor with his back against the wall, gun cocked and aimed at the open doorway. Waiting. Fear making him cold. Muscles so rigid they spasm intermittently.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there. It feels like centuries. There’s not a sound in the flat. No door opening or closing, no movement on the stairs. Is it still there? What was it? It couldn’t have been human—

No, John tells himself firmly, it was human. Had to have been.

But where had it come from? It can’t have followed him through the front door. He’d have heard it. There was nowhere for it to hide. He starts to feel hysterical, to feel panic descending like a frigid shower.

When it begins to recede, he reaches for his mobile phone—and finds the note still clutched in one hand, _CAN’T RUN_ practically glaring up at him as he dials Greg’s number. His hands begin to shake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I did (unapologetically) steal the identity of Sherlock's dealer from Elementary.


	3. The Arrival

_Yes. SH_

_Please. SH_

_Kindly respond with a complete list of your remaining targets as well as confirmation of your current location. Preparations will be made for your return. MH_

*

John has never felt as ridiculous as he does when he’s standing awkwardly in his sitting room, describing the intruder to Greg, while Sergeant Donovan and a small team of unfamiliar men and women canvass the entire building. Greg, however, does not seem to think he sounds like a nutter. Instead, Greg listens solemnly, intently, to John’s stuttered description—tall and thin, dressed in a black suit with a red tie, wearing some sort of thick white stocking mask, seemingly trying to look like the internet phenomenon known as “Slender Man”—and appears far more concerned with John’s physical wellbeing than his mental.

Even when the rest of Scotland Yard leaves—the search having amounted to nothing, not even a trace of the intruder having been found—Greg stays, seats himself across from John at the kitchen table while Mrs Hudson hovers anxiously, offering tea and biscuits and sandwiches.

“What I don’t understand,” says Greg, as Mrs Hudson fills the kettle, “is why you haven’t said a word to me about these until now.” He gestures at the four notes spread about the table between him and John.

“I thought they were just rubbish at first,” John sighs. “When I saw the fourth one tonight, I realised they were important, and I planned to tell you. But then… well.”

He pictures the figure on the stairs again, and shivers at the memory.

“To think he was hiding just outside the door, waiting for you to come home, and I didn’t hear a thing!” Mrs Hudson cries, now pulling cups down from the cupboard. Then she pauses, peering down into one. “When was the last time these were washed, dear?”

John hasn’t a clue—he’s been using the same cup for months, washing it when necessary—and shakes his head to say so, which makes Mrs Hudson purse her lips and carry the cups to the sink.

“You’re sure he didn’t follow you in?” asks Greg.

“I locked the door behind me,” John insists. “Then I walked up the stairs, and suddenly he was just there, watching me.”

Mrs Hudson makes a soft, distressed noise. “I’ll have the locks changed first thing tomorrow.”

“I’ll ring Mycroft,” says Greg, pulling out his mobile, “and see if he can spare any security. Mind you, I’d still prefer it if you spent the next few days in protective custody, but….”

John shakes his head with a frown. He won’t go into protective custody. If the murderer can no longer get to John, he might set his sights on someone else who had been close to Sherlock—Mrs Hudson, maybe, or Molly, someone without army training, someone who has more to lose than an empty flat and a rubbish life.

“What about the patrol you and Sergeant Donovan were supposed to be setting up?” he asks instead.

Greg grimaces. “You know… we had a team patrolling Bart’s the last few days, before Trevor was found. We lost contact with them late last night—” He sighs, setting his phone down and rubbing a palm tiredly over his face. “—and haven’t found a trace of them since. I expect it’ll be in the papers soon, if it isn’t already.”

Mrs Hudson gasps and turns, one hand raised to cover her mouth. John supposes he should feel similarly surprised, but he doesn’t. Rather, he feels a tiny thrill of excitement that finally begins to thaw the still-lingering remnants of his earlier fear. After all, this was what he lived for, wasn’t it? The danger.

_I said ‘danger’, and here you are._

“Right,” he says. “So you’re saying Scotland Yard—”

“I’m saying,” Greg interjects grimly, “I’d feel better if you had more than just the Met looking after you.”

Mrs Hudson abandons washing the cups to step closer and curl an arm around John’s shoulder, pulling him into an awkward sideways hug. John lets his eyelids drift closed and allows himself to relish the distinctly maternal show of affection and concern, which lasts until the kettle clicks off. Then Mrs Hudson lets go and returns to the cups in the sink.

Greg leaves soon after, and pointedly insists that John see him to the door. When they’re at the bottom of the staircase, far from Mrs Hudson’s range of hearing, Greg says, voice lowered, “Tell me honestly, what did you see?”

John frowns, puzzled. “I—I don’t understand. I told you what I saw.”

“Come off it. I’ve seen you walk through the most gruesome of crime scenes like you were having a casual stroll through the countryside. I’ve seen you walk away from near-death experiences _giggling_ like a _loon_ , but when you called me and then when we got here….” He trails off, shaking his head. “I don’t have to be Sherlock to see something got to you, mate.”

Swallowing, John looks away, hoping it doesn’t seem as though he’s evading even though he knows that’s precisely what he’s doing. He can’t tell Greg what it was that got to him—that the man hadn’t looked like someone dressed up as Slender Man, but instead had looked _just like_ Slender Man himself; that he hadn’t seemed to be wearing a mask at all, but instead had seemed to be lacking human facial features altogether; that something had just seemed inexplicably _wrong_ about him. John had been mistaken, obviously, and the less said about that the better.

“It’s hard to explain,” he hedges. “I only got a glimpse, and I was—startled. Very startled. At first I thought I’d seen… well, something that I didn’t.”

Greg steps closer. “Did he look like Moriarty?” he asks, voice barely above a whisper.

For a second, John can only stare, and then, when he’s digested the question, he can’t help but chuckle weakly. “No,” he admits. “He didn’t look anything like Moriarty.” Then, deciding the truth might perhaps be the better solution after all, if this is the alternative, he continues, “He looked _a lot_ like this ‘Slender Man’ thing. It was, well, a bit disconcerting, really. My imagination got away from me, I’m afraid.”

Greg’s shoulders slump, and he fairly deflates. “Ah,” he says. “Right, I suppose that would be a bit of a shock. I can’t say I know much about this ‘Slender Man’, really, just that it was popular on the internet a while back. Do you have any idea why—”

But John is already shaking his head before Greg can finish the question. “No idea. Sorry.”

“Right, well.” Greg shrugs one shoulder wearily, then stares at the door, clearly hesitating, chewing over a thought. “If you wanted, you could… stay with me for a couple of days. I bought a new sofa last month, more comfortable than the last. You could—”

“No,” says John firmly, shaking his head again. He feels like he’s done nothing but shake his head all night. “I’m not running. If it’s not me, it’ll just be someone else, and… well, I’d rather it be me.”

He realises a moment too late that what he’s just said could be construed as a statement of suicidal intent, but Greg seems to take it for what it is, nodding as though he understands entirely.

“I’ll ring Mycroft, like I said,” he says. “And I’ll make sure the flat is put under observation. Hell, I’ll patrol it myself if I have to. Keep your phone with you. I’ll text you regularly, and if you haven’t responded after two minutes….”

“All right,” John agrees. Forcing a reassuring smile, he opens the door for Greg and bids him good night.

*

John has to convince Mrs Hudson to return to her own flat for the night. She offers to kip on the sofa or in Sherlock’s bed, and then to retrieve the lilo stored in her own flat and set it up in John’s, but John of course won’t hear of it. He knows that she’s clever and can hold her own against CIA agents and criminals who had sought Sherlock’s counsel for one reason or another, but none of them had ever brutalised a body so thoroughly it baffled or made a small team of police officers simply disappear.

If Mrs Hudson were hurt—or worse—in John’s stead, John can’t even imagine what he would do with himself.

He’d send her on holiday if he could, but she huffs angrily at the suggestion, so he has to settle for sending her out of his flat and back to her own.

Then he stands in the sitting room, listening to the silence settle like a heavy cloak over 221, and tries to determine what his next move should be.

But what can he do, really? He has no evidence. Scotland Yard has scoured the place and declared it clean, and even if Sherlock had always been perfectly able to see what Scotland Yard’s best had missed, John knows he can never hope to do the same. He had always needed Sherlock standing beside him, pointing, saying, “There, John, don’t you see, _there_!” and John doesn’t have that now. Will never have it again, in fact.

He doesn’t even have the four notes anymore, although he did take quick snapshots of them with his mobile before he’d handed them over to Greg. So there’s nothing to do but wait.

Maggie Wiggins, Rhys Kinlan, Victor Trevor—all were found in the early morning, and Maggie had disappeared sometime during the night, John recalls. If the murderer’s pattern remains consistent, the attack will come in the night.

John climbs the stairs to his bedroom and retrieves his gun, which he’d stashed back in the bedside table before Greg had arrived. Then, moving room by room, he turns every light in the flat off and closes every door and set of curtains he can. His eyes will adjust, his hearing will sharpen, and he will be ready.

He chooses to spend the night in Sherlock’s bedroom. In part because he thinks it might be less predictable than if he were to remain in his own room or the sitting room, and in part because it feels oddly comforting to sit on Sherlock’s bed, bum on the pillows and back against the wall, with his gun heavy and cold in his hands, as he waits for morning.

After an hour or so, John begins to feel that he is being watched again, though this time he can almost certainly pass off the sensation as paranoia. After all, he can see there is no one in the room; no one can stand behind him or outside of his peripheral vision; and he hasn’t heard a single creak of a door or groan of floorboards in the flat. Just paranoia, and the rush of adrenaline making him more susceptible to it.

Then John remembers Baskerville.

*

The night is long but quiet, uneventful, and by morning, John is certain he’s suffering the effects of a hallucinogen.

It makes quite a lot of sense, after all. When John had returned to the flat the previous night, he had seen something that should not have existed, just like at Baskerville, and if the other victims had seen something impossible as well, it would have frightened them horribly. Enough for them to barricade themselves in their flats, as Kinlan had done, and enough to ensure they were helpless with terror when the murderer finally struck. The question, then, is how the murderer doses his victims.

It can’t have been inhaled like the drug at Baskerville, John thinks, since he can’t recall encountering any fog recently and also because he is the only one who seems affected. If gas were being somehow piped into the flat, then Mrs Hudson should have inhaled some of it as well, and she has shown no signs of it.

Instead, John supposes he must’ve ingested it. So after he’s deposited his gun in Sherlock’s bedside table and used the loo, he goes to the kitchen and proceeds to bin nearly everything in the cupboards and refrigerator—sugar, salt and pepper, milk, bread, the Indian takeaway he’d had for dinner a few nights ago. He mulls for a minute or two over the tap—surely there’s no way to ensure only John’s water is drugged?—before he eventually decides that he’ll drink only individual bottles of water from the corner shop just to be sure.

After a shower and a quick change of clothes, he leaves the flat to buy one, and is halfway to the shop when his phone chimes with an incoming text. John pulls it from the pocket of his coat, expecting it to be Greg, who’s followed through on his promise to text John regularly. In fact, he’s managed to text John nearly every hour since last night.

Instead, the text reads: _There is a car approaching to your left. Get in. MH_

John looks to his left and indeed sees a long black car approaching. As he watches, it slows to a stop and sits in the middle of the street, despite the taxi that stops behind and sounds its horn quite loudly.

The phone in John’s hand chimes again. _Please. MH_

With a sigh, John pockets his phone and climbs into the car when its door opens for him.

*

The car takes him to an upscale restaurant in Kensington, where he finds Mycroft waiting for him at a table in a private room. Along the back wall is a long table topped with a rather lavish spread of food.

“Good morning, John,” Mycroft says, with a smile that seems nearly genuine. “I do hope you haven’t eaten.”

“What’s all this?” John asks, seating himself across from Mycroft. “You must’ve talked to Greg by now, so…. Is this meant to be my last meal? Or are you trying to butter me up so you can pump me for information? I told Greg everything that happened, everything I know; I’d just be repeating what you already know. If you’re trying to convince me to do something for you, you should know by now you can’t impress me with an expensive restaurant and a big show of your own importance.”

Mycroft’s smile doesn’t falter. “It can’t be that I am simply worried about you and wish to discuss the current situation in a place where we can both be comfortable, despite the matter at hand?”

“No. If that were true, then you’d have asked me beforehand, not waited until I left and then sent a car to pick me up. Or you’d have come by the flat and not invited me out at all.”

Mycroft, thankfully, doesn’t persist with the façade. The smile drops from his face as though it had never been there at all, and he sips his cup of coffee like a cool and unapproachable prince. “It’s being searched,” he admits after he’s swallowed, setting the cup back on its saucer.

Of course it is, John thinks with a sigh. “It’s already been searched, by Scotland Yard.”

Mycroft cocks his head and gives John a look like John is being dim again and it is not appreciated.

John concedes the point and moves on to another. “No surveillance equipment.” Mycroft frowns exaggeratedly, as though John is being entirely unreasonable, so he adds, firmly, “I’m serious. I might not be able to tell the fate of someone’s marriage by the state of his tie, but I can spot surveillance equipment. And when I get back to the flat, I’ll search it top to bottom, and every camera, every microphone, will be removed, destroyed, and then tossed in the bin outside.”

A long silence follows, while Mycroft surveys him with narrowed eyes and John stares back, unblinking, unflinching, his back straight and his chin up. A member of the wait staff pops his head in to check on them and ducks almost immediately back out.

Finally, Mycroft says, slowly, “I wonder, Doctor, if you realise the depth of your own death wish.”

“I didn’t realise valuing my privacy means I have a death wish.”

“Rebuffing every attempt to ensure your continued safety means you have a death wish. Of course, you haven’t seen the bodies of Mr Kinlan and Mr Trevor, so perhaps you simply don’t fully understand your current situation.”

Mycroft scoots aside his coffee and empty plate and clean set of silverware so that he can rest his elbows on the table, hands clasped, then continues. “I, however, have seen them, and I can say with some confidence that we are dealing with someone who knows not merely how to kill but how to _break_ the human body without leaving a trace of himself behind. And you appear to be his next intended victim.

“In short, Dr Watson,” Mycroft says, unclasping his hands and sitting straight again, “you cannot afford to be lax with your personal safety, and yet lax is precisely what you are being. You have refused the offer to relocate to a more secure location, the offer of assistance, and now this. Does that not sound like a death wish to you?”

John sets his jaw. “No,” he insists. “I’ve not been lax about my personal safety. I’ve taken precautions. I understand the danger I’m in, and I won’t share that danger with another person, nor will I let another person take my place to spare me.”

“Oh certainly that’s part of it. Your selflessness, your desire to protect others even at the risk of yourself, is after all an integral part of your personality, and I’ve no doubt you’ve managed to convince yourself that is the sole reason for your actions. But do you know what I think?”

“Oh, of course, I am as always dying to know what you think,” John answers, deeply sarcastic, but Mycroft pays the comment scarcely any attention.

“I think you’re lost. You go about your day-to-day life, feeling that everything that had once had meaning and excitement is gone, and you would rather throw yourself into the battlefield, entirely unprepared, than spend another day without it. And the worst of it, I think, is that you haven’t even realised _why_ you feel this way.”

John swallows, feeling anger rising like a hot sun inside of him. “Right,” he says, and stands. “Well, this has been delightful, Mycroft, as usual, and as much as I wish I could stay and continue this conversation, I’m afraid we’re done now.”

He whirls around, intending to storm out of the restaurant and all the way back to his flat, but he’s stopped short by Mycroft sighing at his back and saying, “Oh for goodness sake, John, don’t be _dull_.”

It’s manipulative—parroting words he knows John associates with Sherlock, pitching his voice lower so he even sounds like Sherlock—and manipulative in a way that isn’t like Mycroft. Mycroft is subtle, covert; this is Sherlock’s brand of manipulation—brash, transparent, and utterly unrepentant.

And it works, primarily because John finds the tactic curious. He half turns, as Mycroft motions for him to return to his seat and says, “Have it your way. No cameras.”

“No microphones either. No taps. No surveillance of any kind,” John demands, reigning his anger back in, which is a touch easier than he’d thought it would be.

“One microphone in the sitting room,” Mycroft says, and John frowns severely. “Come now, John, given the already, mm… stringent, shall we say, surveillance you’ve been under for some time now, surely one powerful but well-concealed listening device would make no difference.”

“It would to me.”

With a heavy sigh, Mycroft reaches into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulls out his mobile. “If you insist.” As he taps out a message on the screen—presumably calling off the instructions to bug John’s flat—he adds, “In any case, it’s only for one night. Tomorrow morning you’ll be joined at 221B by one of my best men. He should provide some extra degree of protection, I think.”

Returning grudgingly to his chair, John groans. “Thanks, but I really don’t need a bodyguard.”

Mycroft makes a soft, thoughtful noise as he finishes his text and tucks the phone back into his jacket. “Think of him less as a bodyguard and more… as a colleague.” He gives John a smile that is probably meant to be encouraging, but it makes John feel like an animal that Mycroft rather enjoys watching run around at his feet.

“Absolutely not. I mean it. If you send someone to my flat tomorrow, I’ll not only toss him out on his arse, but I’ll show you both that I am plenty capable of protecting myself. Do you understand me?”

“Perfectly,” says Mycroft, although he doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the threat. Before John can reiterate, however, he continues. “Now that that’s settled, would you like a cup of coffee? They have tea as well, but I find the coffee here much more palatable. Unfortunately, I’m afraid the food has likely gotten rather cold by now. Shall I order more?”

John frowns at the long table of food that Mycroft gestures toward. He’d nearly forgotten it, really, and he can think of several dozen people he’d much rather have breakfast with this morning than Mycroft Holmes. But although he sort of likes the idea of Mycroft’s time and money going to waste, he thinks of his flat, all of his food binned, and decides that he can endure.

“No, it’s fine,” he says. “And coffee’s fine, thanks.”

*

The breakfast becomes perhaps the most awkward affair that John has ever had to suffer through, full of long silences broken only by stilted small talk and the clink of silverware on fine china. Afterward, Mycroft confirms over a short phone conversation that the search of John’s flat has turned up nothing, and John is permitted to return to it.

On the car ride, lulled by the motion of the car, alone except for the driver who doesn’t speak, John feels his lack of sleep begin to catch up to him. By the time he’s arrived at Baker Street, he is distinctly woozy, although he’s roused slightly by the sight of Mrs Hudson standing on the step beside a kneeling workman who seems to be replacing the lock on the open door.

When John steps out of the car, Mrs Hudson appears faintly relieved at the sight of him. “Ah, John,” she says, “good morning, dear. Some of Mycroft’s men were by earlier to check the building. Of course, I nearly tossed them out when they showed up. It didn’t seem right, letting them into the flat when you weren’t home, but then I thought, well—”

“It’s all right, Mrs Hudson,” John assures her. “I’ve just been to see Mycroft, actually.”

Mrs Hudson goes wide-eyed with surprise. “Oh. Well, that’s good. I know you and he don’t get on anymore, but I’ve always thought he meant well, no matter how it sometimes seemed. And with everything that’s happened now….”

“Yes,” John says, awkwardly. Then, at a loss for how to continue, he says, with a nod to the workman, “This the new lock then?”

Mrs Hudson hums in agreement, and the man pipes up, “Nearly done, ma’am, it’ll only be another moment,” sounding faintly harried. John suspects he isn’t used to people standing over him so closely, watching him work.

“I had a bolt installed on the door upstairs as well,” says Mrs Hudson. “I thought just a little extra caution couldn’t hurt.”

John nods and steps around her and the workman and into the flat. “Indeed it couldn’t,” he says, and climbs the stairs.

There has in fact been a steel sliding door bolt installed on the door to John’s flat, he notes as he steps inside. It isn’t much, just as a new lock downstairs won’t likely stop a criminal as skilled as this one seems to be, but it is something, and if it helps Mrs Hudson sleep easier, then John supposes it will do.

He locks and unlocks it a few times, testing it, and then sets about inspecting the rest of the flat, ensuring Mycroft’s men have left no surveillance equipment behind and that they’ve not left the place a mess after their no-doubt painstaking search.

After twenty minutes of careful examination of every room, however, John concludes that there are no cameras or listening devices cleverly concealed in the flat and that Mycroft’s men have tidied up after themselves quite well. Actually, if John didn’t know Mycroft as he did, he’d assume the whole thing had been a bluff, since he can see no changes whatsoever from how he’d left the place this morning.

Satisfied, he decides to venture back out of 221B and visit the corner shop, as he’d intended to do before he’d been abducted by Mycroft. After that he’ll have a quiet day at home, he thinks, perhaps have a lie-down before night comes and he has to resume his vigil.

When John returns to the sitting room, however, he’s stopped short by a glimpse of an out-of-place white blotch on the mirror above the fireplace. A piece of paper, a sketch done in black pen.

Had it been there when John returned twenty minutes ago? He can’t recall, although he knows it certainly hadn’t been there when he’d left earlier this morning.

He steps closer to the fireplace to get a better look at the note. The picture this time is of a figure, as tall as the page and wearing a tie and a suit that has been sloppily coloured in black; its head is a plain circle with no face, and its arms are curiously long, extending all the way to what would be the figure’s knees. The words _NO NO NO NO NO NO_ are written vertically on either side of it.

John takes several deep breaths, trying to calm his suddenly turbulent thoughts.

It must, he thinks, have been here when John got back to the flat. After all, he can still hear Mrs Hudson speaking to the workman downstairs—no one could have snuck in while John was otherwise occupied—and there’s no other way into the flat, as far as he knows. But if that’s true, then how had he not noticed the note before now? He’d inspected the mantel for a surveillance camera not long ago; surely he’d have spotted the white piece of paper stuck to the centre of the mirror right above it.

Making a sudden decision, John takes out his mobile phone, opens the camera application, and snaps a picture, being sure to get not only the note but the mirror (his reflection included) and the top of the fireplace in the frame as well.

Then he opens a new text message, types _I think your men might have missed something_ , attaches the photo, and sends it to Mycroft.

“Mrs Hudson!” John calls, and sits down in the armchair to wait for Mycroft’s response.

*

Thirty minutes later, Mycroft is standing in his sitting room, frowning at the note above the fireplace and tapping his brolly against the floor in a harsh rhythm that says he is clearly agitated by the turn of events.

John watches him silently, sipping his tea, which Mrs Hudson had brought upstairs from Speedy’s. (John had been quite insistent, when she’d offered to make him a cuppa to calm his nerves, that he fancied his tea from somewhere outside the flat today, and she’d misinterpreted his insistence and brought him up a sandwich and bag of crisps as well, which he’d eaten out of guilt even though he had been still full from breakfast. He suspects he might not be hungry again for several days now.)

“You are certain there is no possibility that, after my associates left, a person might have slipped inside unnoticed?” Mycroft asks, not looking away from the paper.

“Not a chance,” answers Mrs Hudson, pacing by the door with her arms crossed. “The bolt was being installed by then.”

“And you neither saw nor heard anything when you were up here?”

“Not a thing,” Mrs Hudson confirms.

With a sound that might be a quiet huff, Mycroft turns and begins to stalk about the room, umbrella still tapping incessantly. It takes John only a moment to realise he’s testing the floorboards.

“You think there’s another way to get in,” he surmises, and this time the huff of frustration Mycroft makes in response is unmistakable. “Or at least somewhere to hide.”

“Unlikely. When Sherlock decided to move to 221B, I of course researched and inspected the building fully before he relocated.” Mycroft glimpses John’s expression of surprise and tilts his head condescendingly. “You knew my brother, John. He made no attempts to endear himself to anyone, and he seemed to take great pleasure in angering some of the most… unsavoury types. Of course I ensured the security of what was to be his home.”

Apparently satisfied with the sitting room, Mycroft strides into the kitchen. John sets down his tea and trails after, then follows him into Sherlock’s bedroom, the bathroom, and finally John’s room. Mycroft takes in the details of the flat with a pinched look of concentration and doesn’t linger in any particular location.

“Any theories?” John asks as he follows Mycroft back to the sitting room.

“Several,” Mycroft answers, though his expression gives nothing away about what that might mean exactly. “You might perhaps reconsider your decision regarding surveillance equipment, in light of this recent development?”

John frowns, then looks past him, at Mrs Hudson who is staring at the mantel, her arms still crossed as though she’s dreadfully cold. “All right,” he agrees.

Mycroft’s smile is tight. “Good.”

He returns to the fireplace and this time plucks the note from the mirror, peering intently at it.

“Then it’ll all be installed… later?” John asks.

“Oh no,” Mycroft answers with another smile, pocketing the paper. “It was all installed earlier. I simply didn’t turn any of it on.”

*

When Mycroft has left again and Mrs Hudson has been convinced that John really doesn’t mind if she returns to her own flat, John settles into the armchair with his computer and does a proper internet search for “Slender Man.”

That morning, he’d started to think that this Slender Man business had been pure coincidence. That his mind, under the effects of whatever hallucinogen he’d been dosed with, had conjured the image simply because his interaction with that bloke in front of the mural had been so fresh in his memory at the time.

But the sketch… the tie, the odd proportions of the figure. And Maggie had described her stalker as a tall thin bloke in a black suit with a red tie, and the man on top of the building watching John had had a pale face and his features hadn’t been visible. (“Oh obviously, John,” Sherlock had once scoffed at him, “do you know how many people pass off crucial evidence as _mere coincidence_?”)

How difficult was it to ensure that multiple people, drugged with the same compound, hallucinated the very same image? John’s knowledge of hallucinogenic drugs is, unfortunately, quite limited.

His internet search leads him to artwork, bizarre and poorly written stories and fake accounts, conflicting information, and unfamiliar terms that spawn searches of their own: quantum theory, Tulpa effect, thoughtform.

But he finds nothing about what any of it has to do with Moriarty, or Sherlock, and eventually he decides he’s had enough of Slender Man, enough of the whole thing really. John shoves his computer aside and moves to the sofa to have a lie-down before it gets dark.

*

By the time he finally makes it to the corner shop and buys three bottles of water, it’s half seven and the temperature’s dropped to something more suitable for early January than the strangely warm weather London has been having all week. John bundles his coat more tightly about himself, wishing he’d thought to grab a scarf before he left, and makes his way back to the flat as briskly as possible.

He’s greeted by the odd sight of opened curtains on one of the first-floor windows, giving him a decent view into the lit sitting room of 221B. John lingers for a moment on the pavement, staring up.

It’s not, he supposes, inconceivable that he might have left the lights on, but he knows the curtains hadn’t been open when he left. In fact, the curtains had not been opened since he’d closed them the previous night.

Mrs Hudson’s doing, perhaps, although why she would be opening curtains in his flat in the evening when there is nothing on the street to see, John can’t imagine.

With a deep, bracing breath, he unlocks the front door with his new key and lets himself in. From 221A he can hear the soft, barely audible sounds of the wireless from behind the closed door. Likely not Mrs Hudson’s doing, then; she’d never have left John’s flat with the lights on and the curtains open. John climbs the stairs and lets himself in.

All the lights in the flat are on, including the two floor lamps in the sitting room, the floor lamp in Sherlock’s bedroom, and the desk lamp in John’s. Everything else, however, seems entirely untouched, nothing out of place, and every room is perfectly quiet.

He’s being toyed with, John thinks. Someone is trying to unsettle him—no, more than that, to outright terrify him—which, strangely enough, calls to mind a sentence he’d encountered during his earlier internet search on Slender Man: _typically drives a person slowly to madness until he or she is unable to cope_.

Fortunately, it will take more than playing with the lights in his flat to drive John to madness.

After he’s canvassed the flat and determined it is safe, he goes about turning most of the lights back off, beginning with his bedroom and moving methodically to the bathroom, Sherlock’s bedroom, and the kitchen. As he does, he ponders the layout of 221C and, to a lesser extent, 221A. If there’s a way to get into the building undetected, after all, then surely the basement and ground-floor flats are better candidates for it.

Although, John reminds himself, both Scotland Yard and Mycroft had searched them thoroughly, and it is nearly inconceivable that Mycroft at least had missed anything. Perhaps not impossible, though.

Speaking of. John pulls out his phone and sends a text to Mycroft. _Picked up anything interesting on the cameras yet?_

Leaving all the lights on in the sitting room while he waits for a response, he paces in front of the sofa for a moment, thinking hard. He wonders if this had been how Sherlock felt whenever he’d been stumped on a case, knowing the answer was right in front of him somewhere but still not being able to see it. It really is maddening.

John goes to the window with the still-open curtain and peers out at the street, then feels his muscles go rigid at the sight that awaits him.

On the other side of the street, in front of the building directly across from his, there is a figure standing on the pavement. Tall, unnaturally long arms, wearing a black suit and red tie, his pale head is hairless and faceless.

John stumbles back, nearly sprints to the doorway and down the stairs, thinking of Mrs Hudson alone, unaware, and vulnerable in her flat, but no. It doesn’t want her, he reminds himself. It wants John. And it can’t get John as easily now that John’s spotted it.

He turns back, groping in his coat for his mobile so he can phone Greg, but the figure outside is gone. The pavement in front of the building across the street is empty, and there’s no sign of where the man could have run and hidden so quickly.

Then there’s a soft rustle in the room behind John, and a flicker of movement in the reflection of the window, and John spins around. The figure is there, standing in front of the door. It’s huge, positively massive in height, and its head is inclined as though it’s staring down at John like a god might stare at its creations, though it has no eyes, no expression.

It’s only a hallucination, John tells himself, and despite the pounding of his pulse and the howling of blood in his ears, he feels utterly, eerily calm and rational.

He runs, half anticipating being tackled to the floor, although he makes it all the way to Sherlock’s bedroom and Sherlock’s bedside table, where his Sig still sits. John grabs it, whirls around, aiming in front of him as he marches back through the open doorway. He feels a bit like a police officer in a film, pointing his gun at empty corners, keeping his back always to a wall.

The flat is silent, though, and when he gets back to the sitting room, he finds that it is empty as well.

And, really, he shouldn’t have expected anything else, John realises. No person can move from the street to inside a flat so quickly; no one can get into his flat without climbing the stairs and opening the door first. No one could have been here at all.

Almost as if on cue, his phone chimes in his coat pocket. Still gripping his gun in one hand, John gropes for it and pulls it out.

_Rather a lot of static and distortion, it seems, although someone will be sent to identify and rectify that problem, I assure you. Should the cameras have picked up anything interesting? MH_

Again, John is reminded of his internet search: _An individual can often determine if Slender Man is near by the reactions of certain electronic devices, such as radios, televisions, and cameras._

Downstairs, he hears Mrs Hudson’s door open, followed by Mrs Hudson calling out, “John? Was that you, dear? Are you all right?”

“Yes, Mrs Hudson,” he calls back. “I’m all right.”

With a sigh, John lowers his gun and leans back against the wall beside the door. He has no bloody clue what’s happening to him, or what to do about it.

*

The flat is quiet for the rest of the night, although John keeps swearing he sees flickering shadows and movement in his peripheral vision. Paranoia, his mind playing tricks on him, probably even worse now that he’s gone nearly 48 hours without sleep.

Like the previous night, John settles down on Sherlock’s bed, all the lights off and the doors and curtains closed. Also like the previous night, Greg’s texts, which had tapered off during the day, start up strong again around nine.

He thinks about earlier: the note above the fireplace, finding the lights on when he’d returned from the corner shop, the man he’d seen on the pavement and in his flat, Mycroft’s text, that he’d ingested not a single thing from his flat the entire day. The hallucinogenic compound could metabolise slowly, he supposes, although that seems unlikely. And surely, if hallucinogenic gas were somehow being pumped into John’s flat such that only John is affected, Mycroft or Mycroft’s men would have found evidence of it.

John tries to picture Kinlan’s body, thinking about what Greg had said about it: “spontaneous human demolition…. I don’t have to explain to you how impossible that is.”

He starts to doze around midnight, startling awake occasionally when he thinks he hears a noise in the flat and then dozing again when nothing follows.

At some point John must slip into sleep, and when he blinks himself awake again, it’s gone six and there’s the smell of freshly brewed coffee. The smell is accompanied by the sound of movement in the kitchen, the clink of ceramic cups knocking together. Mrs Hudson, it must be, although John isn’t sure why she would be in his flat making coffee so early.

He stands, wincing as his stiff limbs crack and creak. He’s too old to sleep in funny positions; his back and shoulders positively _ache_. After John has stored his Sig in Sherlock’s bedside table, he follows the sounds and smells into the kitchen.

Only it’s not Mrs Hudson pouring coffee into John’s usual tea cup. It’s a man with short dark hair, wearing a pair of black trousers and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looks oddly familiar, although it’s not until he turns at John’s shout of alarm that John realises why.

“Ah, John,” says Sherlock. “Good, you’re awake.”


	4. Tulpa

John is frozen in the doorway, staring like an idiot, for what seems like ages. At first he is certain that he’s cracked, that the Sherlock standing in front of him is a figment of his imagination, a product of either hallucinogenic drugs or his own sleep-addled brain.

Then John realises that if he were to hallucinate Sherlock in his kitchen at arse o’clock in the morning, Sherlock would likely appear as John most vividly remembers him: in his dressing gown, hair a mess, entirely immersed in either an experiment or his own thoughts. Not with his hair cut short and tidy, and making coffee, and dropping everything at John’s entrance to beam at him.

Sherlock, of course, detects the change in John’s emotions from paralyzed incredulity to incandescent rage, and the grin melts from his face, replaced with a lofty eye roll. “Yes, yes, I’m alive, you’re angry at me for allowing you to think otherwise, now can we carry on or will you insist upon—”

“You _tit_!” John shouts. If he were holding anything or standing close enough to a liftable object, he would lob it straight at Sherlock’s head. “You complete and utter _bastard_! Do you have any idea what it’s been like thinking you’d gone and—”

“Yes, John, I know, more than a bit not good. But if you knew my reasons—”

“Sod your reasons, you egotistical knob end! If you thought for one fucking second that there was a good reason to _jump off a bloody building_ right in front of me—”

John’s bellowing with rage now, and Sherlock looks quite panicked at the development, stepping closer with his hands raised in a please-don’t-shoot gesture that John pays little attention to because now Sherlock is close enough to take a swing at. Which is precisely what he does, although Sherlock—the mind-reading bastard—ducks easily and tries to pin John’s arms to his sides.

“John, please, just calm down and listen,” he says urgently. “You’ll wake Mrs Hudson.”

Too late, of course. Not a minute later, while the two of them are still flailing about like boys in a schoolyard brawl, Mrs Hudson’s alarmed voice comes from the stairway, accompanied by the thudding of her hurried footsteps. “John! John, are you all right?”

There is the sound of the door to the flat being thrown open, and then Mrs Hudson is standing in her nightgown at the entrance to the kitchen, holding of all things a chef’s knife as though prepared to plunge it into an intruder’s back. At the sight of Sherlock, though, she drops it instantly and instead raises her hand to her open mouth.

“What… Sherlock?”

It seems to John that she is about to fall in a dead faint, swaying a bit as though lightheaded, and Sherlock must think the same, since he abandons his task of trying to keep hold of John’s fists and rushes to her side. John is right on his heels, reaching to steady her and murmuring, “It’s all right, Mrs Hudson. Deep breaths, now.”

_Slap._

For a long moment, John isn’t sure what he’s just witnessed, except that it’s left Sherlock reeling backward, hand on his cheek, looking as outright baffled as John has ever seen him. Then Mrs Hudson’s raised hand and pinched, furious expression finally register in John’s mind.

“Sherlock Holmes,” she says, “ _really_.”

John lets her aim one more good smack at the top of Sherlock’s head before he intervenes.

*

Sherlock explains it all, of course, while John sits at the table in stony silence and Mrs Hudson paces the kitchen and makes agitated and disbelieving sounds—about Moriarty and the gunmen, and how he’d been trying to ensure John’s, Greg’s, and Mrs Hudson’s continued existence.

“Who knew?” John demands, fuming. “Mycroft, obviously.” Because Mycroft knew everything, especially about Sherlock, and he had said the previous day that he was sending over a “colleague” to John’s flat, wearing a smug little smile as he’d said it, so obviously he had known.

“It was crucial that as few people as possible—” Sherlock begins, but John is not really interested in listening to him hedge.

“Did Greg know?”

“No,” says Sherlock, but then the corner of his lip turns down. “Well. He knows _now_ , of course, and he responded much like you, although he went for an uppercut to the abdomen instead of a hook to the face. It was a bit hard to sneak in with him skulking about outside like a watchdog. I told him to go home, obviously; no one will benefit from him forsaking sleep to keep guard when someone else could more capably perform the same duty.”

It’s news to John that Greg had been guarding the flat last night, and he’s not sure how he feels about it. After all, it’s not exactly reassuring to know a detective inspector doubts Scotland Yard’s ability to locate a killer so much that he’s staking out flats at night on his own.

“None of you could know,” Sherlock continues. He leans across the table like he really, really needs John to grasp this idea. “You had to be seen mourning me, and it had to look real, John, don’t you see?”

“Oh, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson sighs.

“I’d have been alone here while you were off doing god-knows-what,” John snaps. “I’m sure I could have summoned up enough woe and gloom to make it look convincing.”

“Really, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson adds, “if you could’ve seen what you’d done to John these past six months….”

It reminds John vaguely of what Mycroft had said—“You go about your day-to-day life, feeling that everything that had once had meaning and excitement is gone”—and dear god, what _had_ Mycroft been telling Sherlock all these months?

“Yes,” he says, before Mrs Hudson can add anything else. “Not the best time for any of us, I’m afraid.”

“Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?” grouses Sherlock. “I realised I’d made a… miscalculation when it became clear that my sham had put you in danger, so perhaps we could cease this discussion and move on to something more important.”

John, in fact, would like to carry on, since he still has several views he’d like to share on the subject, but then his brain manages to process Sherlock’s words. “Wait. Your _sham_ put me in danger? Don’t you mean your ‘death’?”

Sherlock throws himself back in his chair. “Of course not. Isn’t it obvious?” He looks back and forth between John and Mrs Hudson, but doesn’t seem too terribly put out when no answer is forthcoming. “You’ve surely noticed the connection between the three victims.”

“Of course,” says John. “They were all… friends of yours.”

He half expects Sherlock to protest at the term, but he only inclines his head in acknowledgement. “And all were murdered quite gruesomely, their bodies disposed of very publicly. The murderer doesn’t just want attention for his crimes; the attention is the _point_. Wiggins first, an old ‘friend’, as you said, a distant friend. Kinlan, a little less old and less distant. Victor, older but much less distant. And—” He seems to hesitate for a moment, staring somewhere over John’s head. Suddenly it occurs to John that this must be quite a difficult topic for Sherlock, the deaths of the people close to him simply because they’d been close to him. “—now you, neither old nor distant. Circling, you see, coming closer and closer to me at the centre.”

“You think the whole thing is a message for you,” John surmises.

“Close, but not quite. I said _attention_ was the point, John, not a message. Do keep up. Whose attention, then? Mine, of course, can’t be anyone else.”

John sees it now. “And why would the murderer try to get your attention if he thought you were dead?”

“Exactly,” Sherlock says grimly. “I suspect he wants me to ‘come clean’, as it were. You were the bait to lure me close enough that I can be exposed.”

It says quite a lot, John thinks, that Sherlock’s allowed himself to be baited, that what drove him away is the same thing that’s managed to drive him back. He can’t rightly call himself a sociopath now.

“Oh dear,” says Mrs Hudson faintly. “Do you know who it is then?”

Sherlock swivels his head to one side, like he intends to shake his head but is stalled by a thought.

“Greg thinks it might be Moriarty,” John volunteers. “Or one of his men. Speaking of Moriarty, is _he_ dead? Or was that just a sham too?”

“I’m not familiar with any way to sham a bullet through the skull,” Sherlock answers, although he seems to still be considering the question carefully even as he speaks. “Or the injuries his body seemed to sustain, so…. Unlikely. Perhaps not impossible, but very, very highly improbable.”

He considers the possibility a few seconds longer; then his eyes refocus and travel from John to Mrs Hudson and back again.

“Oh, go on. Ask,” Sherlock says, his lips curling into a tiny smirk. “I know you’re curious how I did it.”

John had been quite curious indeed how a man, even one as clever as Sherlock, could fake his own death, but Sherlock’s smug little smirk, how he’s just waiting to preen at his own brilliance after John had mourned him, dreamt of him, cried and hurt over him—it turns John right off the idea.

“Actually,” he says, coming to his feet, hating the twinge of guilt he feels when Sherlock’s grin freezes and falls, “I think I’ll have a shower. See you in a bit.”

*

In the shower, John stands directly beneath the showerhead and lets himself crack a bit. Between the murders and the notes and the maybe-or-maybe-not hallucinogenic drugs and Slender Man popping up everywhere and Sherlock not being dead after all, he feels he deserves it.

He feels better afterward. He brushes his teeth in front of the mirror and finally lets himself be fiercely, crushingly, tremblingly relieved that Sherlock is alive. Not only because Sherlock is Sherlock, the brilliant madman who is apparently the breath to John’s corpse of a life, but also because Sherlock will solve this. Sherlock will unravel this mess of a case, and everything will be fine.

The anger— _fury_ , really—at Sherlock for what he’s done, the hell he’s caused John, will have to wait until this has passed.

John leaves the bathroom to find Mrs Hudson gone and Sherlock seated in his armchair in the sitting room, John’s computer balanced on his knees, staring at the screen with his fingers clasped beneath his chin. He looks so like he used to, despite the shorter hair, that John feels something swell and ache in his chest.

“I’ve programmed my new number into your phone,” he says when John walks in. “You had a text from Mycroft; he’s sending someone to check the functioning of the security cameras and audio devices later.”

Instantly, the pleasant feelings and the peace from his shower, his resolution to shelve his fury, begin to dissipate, because it _isn’t_ like it used to be, and Sherlock has no right to sit there and help himself to John’s things as though the last six months have never happened. “No,” John says. “Sherlock, this isn’t…. We’re not doing this, pretending as though everything’s all right.”

“We’re not?”

Sherlock doesn’t so much as glance at John as he speaks, so John marches angrily over and snatches up his computer. As he does, he gets a good look at what Sherlock is reading: the same page about Slender Man that John had been browsing the previous day.

John’s taken aback, and finds his anger momentarily overtaken by curiosity. “Are you—”

“It was in your browser history. Odd, isn’t it, what people’s tiny minds can come up with.”

John is struck with a tiny wave of embarrassment, like he’s been caught at something shameful, although he doesn’t know why. Perhaps he is just no longer accustomed to Sherlock’s invasions of privacy.

“You described your intruder to Lestrade as a tall thin man wearing a white stocking mask,” Sherlock says, his sharp gaze shifting unnervingly to John’s face. Another thing John has to become re-accustomed to. “You said he looked like that.” He nods toward the computer in John’s hands. “I’m surprised the disguise was familiar to you. Doesn’t seem like your area.”

John concedes the point with a shrug, closes the laptop, and sets it gently on the table. “I wouldn’t have recognized it if I hadn’t been just recently introduced to the idea of the Slender Man.”

He does a quick visual search of the flat and spots his mobile phone on the kitchen table, right in front of where Sherlock had been seated earlier. He moves to scoop it up and continues. “I thought part of one of the murals dedicated to you on Southampton Street looked funnily like the figure in the notes I’d been getting.” He pulls up the photograph of the Slender Man-like stick figure and holds it out so Sherlock can see. “Apparently others said it looked like Slender Man.”

Sherlock takes the proffered phone and holds the screen very near his face, peering at it. “The murals dedicated to me?” he says, frowning, although even as he says it he’s clicking through the rest of the photos and viewing the full wall of graffiti.

“They’re all over London. Well, all over the UK, really, and even some over in America, I’ve heard. Apparently your _sham_ got you quite a large fan base.” There’s more than a touch of bitterness in his tone.

Shelve it, John reminds himself.

Sherlock’s expression twists into a mixture of incredulity, derision, and a hint of pleasure, and then he hands John back his phone. “Interesting” is all he says before he settles back in the armchair, fingers steepled in his typical thinking pose. “You’ve thrown out nearly all the food in the flat,” he says.

John means to respond truthfully, to admit he’d believed himself to be drugged—how can Sherlock work if he doesn’t have all the facts, after all?—but somehow when he opens his mouth, what emerges instead is “No, I just haven’t got around to doing the shopping this week.”

“Mm,” hums Sherlock, which is the last sound he makes for the next several hours.

*

Sherlock comes out of his thinking trance when Mycroft’s men arrive to inspect the surveillance equipment (which, it turns out, are located primarily on light sources, although they are all so small and unobtrusive John has trouble spotting them even now he knows where they are).

“Where is Mycroft?” John wonders as he watches them work.

“He’s taken it upon himself to finish the mission I undertook six months ago,” answers Sherlock, “and also to perform most of the legwork for this investigation so I can remain here and maintain a low profile. In fact, he went so far as to prohibit me from leaving and trying to investigate on my own. His choice of punishment if I disregard his little rule is… interesting, to say the least.”

John blinks, stunned. “That’s… quite a lot of work.”

Sherlock makes a production of shrugging. “I suppose. Let’s hope the British government can cope.”

After Mycroft’s men have left, speaking not a word to Sherlock or to John, Sherlock wanders from room to room while John trails after him, occasionally answering questions that Sherlock barks, like “Where precisely were you standing when you saw the note on the mirror?” and “Before this morning, when was the last time you showered?”

Then they go downstairs to 221A, where they repeat the whole thing, this time with Mrs Hudson in tow, then 221C. Afterward, Sherlock returns to 221B, throws himself on his back on the sofa, pulls out his phone, and begins to text rapidly.

John sits in the armchair with his computer and faffs about on the internet while he thinks about Sherlock, Moriarty, and Slender Man, both the figure he’s seen multiple times now and the mythological creature who’s described in detail online.

His mind keeps getting stuck, though, on the image of the tall, unnatural figure that had stood not three metres away from where John sits now. It loops round and round in his head, how John could see the fibres of its suit jacket, the smooth texture of its white skin, and how it had genuinely seemed that he could have stepped toward it, reached out, and touched it.

At half seven that night, Greg brings Chinese takeaway for dinner, and the four of them—Greg, Sherlock, John, and Mrs Hudson—assemble around the kitchen table. Greg too seems to have shelved most of his anger toward Sherlock, although he does seem colder toward Sherlock than John remembers and he also seems unwilling to stare directly into Sherlock’s face for any period of time.

“So apparently your brother’s team found something on Trevor,” Greg says to Sherlock, gaze on his own plate.

“Grass seeds stuck beneath the shoelaces of Victor’s boot,” confirms Sherlock. “They’re still being analysed, last I heard. Small and easy to miss, I suppose, although one would think the investigators at Scotland Yard would be trained to—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Greg interrupts gruffly, jaw clenching. “We utterly bollixed the case up. Believe me, mate, no one knows that better than I do. I’ve been thinking about taking a page from John’s book, punching the chief in the nose and showing him exactly what I think of him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock scoffs. “You’re much more useful as an informed member of the Yard. Though I do appreciate the loyalty implied by the thought.”

Greg huffs a tired-sounding laugh. “At this point, I think the Yard might be the only ones in London who _aren’t_ loyal to you.”

Sherlock’s expression goes blank with surprise, and John reminds him, “I told you about the murals, remember.”

“Oh, the murals are just the tip of the iceberg, dear,” pipes up Mrs Hudson. “I haven’t checked myself, but Mrs Turner was telling me just the other week that the internet is crawling with Sherlock Holmes fan communities and sites and the like.”

John blinks, as baffled as Sherlock seems to be not just that Sherlock has gained so many fans after his “death” but that Mrs Hudson and Mrs Turner apparently get together and discuss Sherlock’s online fan base.

“It’s true,” Greg agrees with a grimace. “Though your fans might not be so loyal when they find out you’ve been having them on this whole time….”

“Yes, well,” Sherlock says, looking suddenly uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation, “interesting as this may be, it won’t get us any closer to finding the one responsible for these murders, so perhaps we could leave this topic and move on to something more useful.”

The discussion does indeed move on, although it becomes quite clear that they have little to go on. Scotland Yard is clueless, Mycroft’s men somewhat less so, and the plan is defensive—keeping John secure in his flat, under constant surveillance—rather than offensive. John should probably feel doomed or at least more wary than he does, but now he feels almost confident.

At the very least, he thinks, if he goes down, then he’ll go down fighting and with Sherlock at his side.

*

After Greg leaves around ten and Mrs Hudson returns to her flat, John puts the leftover takeaway cartons in the fridge, and Sherlock says, “It would probably be best if you spent the night in my bedroom again.”

John pauses, then rubs the back of his head awkwardly. “Er. What?”

With a shrug, Sherlock doesn’t so much as glance up from his phone. “That’s where you spent last night and the previous night too, if I’m not mistaken. In part, I imagine, because you found the remnants of my presence comforting, but also because you thought it would provide you a strategic advantage in case you were attacked. Since your reasoning in that regard is… not entirely flawed, I thought it would be best to carry on as you had been.”

“Now hold on,” John says, prickling defensively for a reason that he can’t quite name. “I didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter, of course,” Sherlock says, ignoring him, thumb swiping rapidly over his mobile screen. “Keeping yourself awake on the sofa or dozing in my bed, I’ll obviously be joining you wherever you intend on spending the night.”

“Obviously,” John echoes. He realises he’s still not closed the fridge, that he’s been standing here like an idiot with his arms covered in goose bumps from the chill, and hastily lets the door close. “Right.”

Lowering his phone, Sherlock narrows his eyes like John is being spectacularly ignorant. “It’s obvious from looking at you that you’re exhausted. Your sleeping habits have been poor for months, a result of nightmares and insomnia, and after at least two nights of keeping yourself alert all night, you’re practically dead on your feet and likely to drift off if you try to do so again. Therefore, if the murderer makes his attack tonight, you’ll not be in prime condition to defend yourself. If you think that, under these circumstances, I’m letting you spend the night alone in your room upstairs, you’re an idiot.”

In the end, John decides on Sherlock’s room, primarily because “not entirely flawed” in Sherlock-speak is nearly a compliment on his cleverness. He regrets the decision almost instantly, though, because it leads to him lying on his back on the right side of the bed in his pyjamas and Sherlock sitting, fully clothed, just beside him in the dark.

“Well, this is awkward,” John murmurs.

“Mm” is Sherlock’s only response.

John knows objectively that Sherlock can spend ungodly stretches of time sitting awake, motionless, occupied by only his thoughts if he has an interesting enough case, but lying in the dark beside him as he does it, John is suddenly intensely uncomfortable. Is Sherlock thinking about the murderer? About John?

“What were you doing?” he finds himself saying. “Your mission, that is, the one you said Mycroft’s taken over.”

The following silence is so long that John thinks Sherlock is purposely ignoring him, but then Sherlock answers, “Dismantling Moriarty’s web. I thought that was obvious.”

“No, it was,” John admits. “I meant… the specifics, I suppose.”

Sherlock shifts slightly, and the mattress trembles with the movement. “The specifics,” Sherlock mutters thoughtfully. “Most of my focus of late has been locating Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s second in command. The rest of Moriarty’s network has been simple in comparison. Without the assistance of modern technology, of course, it might have taken two or three years, but—”

“You were working alone?” John asks, although he doesn’t wait for an answer. He doesn’t need to. “You prat. You were trying to show off, weren’t you? You’re back now, Mycroft’s dealing with the rest of it, so clearly it wasn’t necessary for you to bugger off on your own to begin with. You could’ve gone to Mycroft— _any_ of us, even—for help all along, but you wanted to do it on your own so you could show off how clever you are.”

Sherlock’s silence speaks volumes, and John has half a mind to hit him or at the very least curse at him loudly and then refuse to speak to him. But he’s shelving all that, he reminds himself, and tries to shove the impulse back down where it had come from.

“I do regret that I caused you distress,” Sherlock says eventually. “Psychological and otherwise. If I had known that this is where my actions would lead….”

“You’re a tit,” John tells him. “An utterly egotistical bastard for—for doing what you did right in front of me.” John’s voice goes thick with emotion, and he has to clear his throat before he can continue. “But I am sorry about Maggie and Victor and Kinlan.”

Sherlock makes a quiet, assenting noise, and then John feels him move again, lifting the gun from the duvet so he can shift perhaps an inch closer to John. It feels a bit like an attempt at comfort, although John wonders which of them it’s intended for.

“Go to sleep, John,” Sherlock says with a sigh. “You’re more use to me well-rested.”

*

John falls asleep and wakes up at some point later to an uncomfortably full bladder and a dry throat. As he starts to untangle himself from the bedsheets, he practically feels Sherlock rouse from his thoughts before he says, “John?” with a note of concern in his voice.

“Just need to use the loo,” John assures him, “and get some water. It won’t take long.”

He stumbles out of Sherlock’s bedroom in a sort of sleep-hazy state, although by the time he gets to the loo and uses the toilet, he feels wide awake, enough so that he worries he’ll have trouble returning to sleep when he’s finished.

As John bends over the sink to wash his hands, he spots movement in his peripheral vision—in the mirror in front of him, a reflection of a tall, tall shape, black and white with a touch of red, standing just behind John.

Heart in his throat, breath knocked from him like a blow to the diaphragm, John whirls around, arm thrusting out to defend himself.

But he’s alone; only the bathroom wall is behind him. He spins back around, but the mirror shows nothing either, just John with his chest heaving, lips parted, and eyes wide.

He turns off the tap and listens for a moment to the silence of the flat, waiting for the fight-or-flight response to recede. He thinks about calling for Sherlock but dismisses the thought just as quickly. He can’t even imagine Sherlock’s face, if John told him he’d just seen Slender Man in the mirror.

He walks to the kitchen, moving slowly, still listening for breaks in the silence, but even though the flat is perfectly calm and quiet, John can feel that something is off. The sensation of someone’s gaze on him tingles between his shoulder blades, and the sudden chill of danger makes him want to shiver, to cross his arms and curl in on himself, but he stands tall and keeps moving.

John comes to the kitchen, flips on the light, and sees it immediately: in the sitting room, standing just beyond the fireplace. Exactly as the pictures on the internet portray it: hulkingly tall but thin, its wiry arms hanging past its knees, wearing a black suit and a red tie. It has no face, no eyes, but John knows somehow that it’s staring at him, watching him like a human watches an insect, waiting to see what the little thing will do next.

“Fucking hell,” John breathes. His voice is barely a whisper. “You’re actually real, aren’t you?”

Slender Man steps toward him. Its feet pad audibly on the floorboards. John stumbles farther into the kitchen away from it, sucking in a deep breath to scream for Sherlock.

Before he gets the chance to, he hears a flurry of movement from Sherlock’s bedroom, hears Sherlock calling, “John?” just as Sherlock appears, eyes so wide they look almost wild as they take in John’s appearance, then the rest of the flat.

John turns his gaze to Sherlock for just a second, but when he glances back, Slender Man is gone.

“What happened?” Sherlock rushes to him, hands grabbing at John’s shoulders and pulling him closer as though he intends to curl himself around John like some sort of shield but then changes his mind halfway. “John!”

John can’t say it. He can’t open his mouth and tell Sherlock bloody Holmes that he’s just seen Slender Man in the sitting room, that Slender Man had been coming to take him… somewhere. Wherever Slender Man takes victims before bringing them back utterly demolished. Sherlock would think he’d gone doolally. Perhaps he _has_ gone doolally, but he can’t tell Sherlock that either. Not now.

“Nothing,” he says instead. “Nothing, sorry, I just…. Still half asleep, you know.”

Sherlock peers down at him, using every bit of his extra height to make John feel like a child fibbing to a parent, but John doesn’t let himself cave. Not even when Sherlock’s gaze takes on the intensity that means he’s picking apart every detail of John’s appearance and using it all to get a glimpse into John’s head.

“I didn’t mean to worry you,” John insists. “I’m going to lie back down, yeah?”

Sherlock doesn’t argue with him, just follows John silently into the bedroom and climbs back onto the left side of the bed after John is comfortably situated on the right.

John nearly jumps out of his skin when he feels a light touch at the top of his head, and his panic only somewhat abates when he realises that it’s Sherlock.

“Sherlock,” he says, as Sherlock’s hand begins to make an odd sort of petting motion against his hair, “what are you doing?”

Sherlock sighs grumpily. “Isn’t this what people do when someone gets upset?”

It’s perhaps the oddest thing Sherlock has ever done, at least in John’s presence. He clearly hasn’t the faintest clue how to stroke someone’s hair soothingly. His touch is too heavy, and his movements are awkward, almost wooden. Still, despite that, John feels his pulse begin to slow, and calm to replace the panic and the rush of adrenaline.

It’s not until he can see the glow of the sunrise seeping under the edges of the curtains, though, that he is able to fall back asleep.

*

He’s startled out of a doze by Sherlock climbing under the duvet and settling into bed with his head on the pillow beside John. The light peeking through the curtains is bright enough that John doesn’t even have to squint to see Sherlock’s features, his eyes open and fixed on John.

“Are you tired?” John asks, his voice still thick with sleep. “We could have switched, you know, and I could have kept guard while you had a sleep.”

“ _Bored_ ,” Sherlock says instead. He flops about on the mattress until he seems to find a comfortable position, on his side facing John. “You let me stroke your hair for nearly an hour last night, and now you’re tolerating my presence beside you, in the same bed as you, without protest. I admit I thought you’d at least maintain the illusion of being angry at me for longer.”

“Extenuating circumstances,” John points out. “Plus, I’m not sure how my allowing you to ‘stroke my hair’, if that’s what we’re calling the frankly bizarre—”

“You derive pleasure from my proximity,” Sherlock interrupts. “In fact, I suspect if I were to come closer—” And he does just that, sliding several inches closer until they could nearly be snuggling. John can smell him, feel the warmth of his body. “—ah, see! Your breathing’s sped up, and your heart rate’s increased. A clear pleasure response.”

John scoots away, replacing the space between them, until he’s pressed up against the edge of the bed. “It could also be a mild fear response,” he reminds Sherlock. “Which would make sense, considering how disconcerting this is, since we don’t as a general rule have the sort of friendship which involves cuddling in bed.”

“I’m not sure if you’re pretending at being obtuse, or if the degree of your self-denial is really so large.”

It takes a moment for the implications to sink in, and then John feels almost helplessly confused. It’s too early for this, and he still hasn’t quite recovered from the previous night, the sight of the Slender Man in his sitting room. For that matter, he still hasn’t recovered from Sherlock’s reappearance. It’s not fair that Sherlock should be using John’s physiological responses as some sort of… experiment to cure his boredom and then making wild accusations based off them.

“You know, Sherlock, not everyone finds you irresistibly attractive,” John says, because he feels like he has to say _something_ , and everything else that pops into John’s head would just sound, well, overly defensive and consequently suspect.

“Of course not. But you do.” Sherlock smiles as he says it, smug and satisfied like a freshly fed cat.

It’s too much. John passed his weekly quota for bizarre happenings days ago, and even if he hadn’t, Sherlock lying beside him and practically flirting with him would have exceeded it alone.

“Right,” he says, throwing the duvet and sheets back and rolling out of bed. “I’m getting up.”

“Just as things were finally getting _interesting_ ,” Sherlock complains, but John ignores him and walks out of the room, making his way to the loo.

When he comes out, he finds Sherlock sprawled across the sofa, tapping at his mobile phone. He looks perfectly neat and tidy, his short hair all in place, his clothes wrinkle-free, even though he’s just spent the last several minutes rolling about in bed.

John blinks at the sight for a moment, then goes to the kitchen to make tea.

“ _Sesleria caerulea_ ,” Sherlock calls to him. “More commonly known as blue moor-grass.”

“Blue moor-grass,” John repeats to himself, abandoning his task to come stand in the entrance to the sitting room. “The grass seeds on Victor Trevor’s boot?”

“Mm. Found most abundantly in Northern England, apparently, and practically unheard of this far south.”

“He lived in London, didn’t he?” In response, Sherlock makes another assenting hum. “So he was, what, transported to Northern England to be killed, then transported back to be deposited? Is that even plausible? What purpose could that possibly serve?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer. Instead, he drops his arm over the edge of the sofa, letting his phone fall to the floor, then steeples his fingers beneath his chin and closes his eyes. John leaves him to think, returning to the kitchen to finish making tea.

He makes a cup for Sherlock too, even though it’ll likely just sit and go cold, and carries both it and his own to the sitting room. Sherlock cracks one eye open to watch John set the cups on the table, and John tells him, with a nod to Sherlock’s cup, “I made you one if you want it.”

Swinging his legs off the sofa and setting his feet on the floor, Sherlock sits up, then leans forward, elbows on his knees and fingers clasped. He eyes John intently. “Why did you lie?” he asks.

John stops, rubs the back of his head uncomfortably. “Er. I’m sorry?”

“Last night. Yesterday too, nearly half a dozen times. All about your experiences, things you personally have witnessed—what happened last night, what you saw the night you summoned Lestrade here, why you’ve thrown out all the food in the flat. You’re a pitiful liar, John, especially to me; it’s pointless of you even to try, and you usually don’t bother. The question, then, is why bother now?”

“Sherlock,” John sighs, at a loss.

Sherlock huffs in exasperation, then continues. “You said the food had gone off, which I might’ve believed—you’re depressed, not eating, you’ve lost weight—but you blinked more rapidly as you said it. A lie, but why? You mustn’t have binned any of it for the usual reasons, of course, nor because of some failing of your own—you didn’t seem embarrassed enough for that. So you must have worried it was… contaminated in some way? Yes, I can tell by your face. Poison?”

“Hallucinogens,” John admits. He reckons he should have been expecting this; of course he couldn’t lie to Sherlock’s face and expect Sherlock to carry on as though he hadn’t seen right through it. “The night I called Greg, I thought I’d seen something on the stairs that shouldn’t have been real.”

“What?”

“Slender Man.”

It feels oddly liberating to say it out loud, to let it out from where it’s been festering in his mind, even if it is to Sherlock. Although Sherlock doesn’t seem particularly affected by the confession now. He simply blinks and furrows his eyebrows at John like he’s trying to find the hidden meaning in John’s response.

“The thing on the internet,” John clarifies. “Wears a suit and tie, no face, supposedly stalks people—”

“I know what it is,” Sherlock interrupts with a scowl. “And that’s what you told Lestrade you’d seen: a tall man wearing a stocking mask to hide his features—”

“I told Greg I’d seen someone dressed as Slender Man, yes, but that’s not what I saw. I saw _the_ Slender Man. The thing itself.” He glances away, not wanting to see the look on Sherlock’s face, and then the words start pouring from his mouth like water from an unclogged pipe. “I saw it last night too, standing just over there, watching me, and the night before…. It wasn’t a person; all the disguises or makeup in the world couldn’t make a person look like that. So I thought I must’ve been drugged, hallucinating things like at Baskerville, but—Sherlock, what are you doing?”

Because Sherlock has launched himself at his phone and is back to tapping rapidly at the screen, practically vibrating with renewed energy. “Texting Mycroft,” he answers. “We’ll have to have you tested for hallucinogenic compounds, of course, and although I’d prefer to do the analysis myself, I don’t have the necessary equipment here.”

“No, Sherlock, that’s not what I said.” John is shaking his head emphatically, but of course Sherlock is paying him no attention. So he makes a grab for the phone, which—although Sherlock pulls it away from him easily—at least gets his attention again. “I _thought_ I was drugged. Now I’m fairly certain I’m not. It’s nothing like at Baskerville, for one, and—”

“More sophisticated compound,” says Sherlock. “Obviously, John, what other explanation is there? You can’t possibly believe Slender Man, the creation of a group of teenaged misanthropists on the _internet_ , is stalking people and killing them. Ignoring for a moment the utter impossibility of such a thing, what interest could Slender Man have in me or the people I am close to?”

John doesn’t know, of course. The idea’s been circling uselessly in his mind for days now, and he’s come to no conclusions yet. But Sherlock is staring at him with shrewd, critical eyes, and if John admits he doesn’t know, Sherlock will dismiss and belittle him, so John says the first thing that comes to mind: “Tulpa.”

Sherlock frowns. “What?”

“Tulpa. I read about it the other day when I was researching Slender Man. It’s… a sort of thoughtform, a concept in Tibetan Buddhism. It’s the physical manifestation of a thought, created by the power of the thought alone. No, I know, it sounds mad,” he says hastily, because Sherlock is staring at him like he’s crackers, but suddenly it’s like a piece of a puzzle has been slotted into place. John sees connections now that hadn’t seemed to exist before.

This must be what it’s like for Sherlock, he thinks, why Sherlock says talking helps him think.

“You said the murderer was trying to get your attention, to call you out. So… so think of it like this. You have practically an army of fans now,” John continues. “Thousands of people worldwide who believe in you, have devoted hours of their time and their thoughts to you, even dedicated fan pages and murals all over London and other parts of the world to you. At least one of which features a drawing that looks distinctly like Slender Man.”

And which, John thinks, at least one person has taken a photograph of, and possibly shared it, and which other people might have done as well. Who knows how many people online have seen the graffiti on Southampton Street and talked about the stick figure’s resemblance to Slender Man. But John doesn’t say any of that, because Sherlock’s expression has moved past John-is-a-bit-crackers and onto perhaps-John-should-be-sectioned, and John’s train of thought stutters to a stop.

“You think I’m barking, don’t you?” he asks.

Sherlock swallows, looking as uncomfortable and unsure as John has ever seen him. “I think you’re dreadfully sleep-deprived and under a great deal of stress. Greater minds than yours have struggled under less, John.”

John sighs and scrubs his palms over his face in tiredness and frustration. Then a thought occurs to him, and he demands, “Ask Mycroft about the cameras. I guarantee there’ll have been static and distortion around the same time that I was out of bed last night.”

Sherlock glances at the phone in his hand like he’d nearly forgotten it was there. He nods once, jerkily.

“Good.” With a nod of his own, John reaches for his tea—probably cold by now and suddenly a lot less appealing than it had been when he’d made it—then changes his mind. “I think I’ll go check on Mrs Hudson,” he decides, standing. “She should be up and about now. You can come get me when you need to test for drugs, or whatever you decide to do.”

*

Mrs Hudson assumes he’s had a row with Sherlock and is all too willing to make sympathetic noises and even commiserate a bit.

“You remember how he is, dear,” she says as she doles John out some beans and toast. “Absolutely infuriating. Did you see what he did to the bolt I had installed on your door? So he could break in and give us all a scare, after everything he’s already done!”

They settle down to watch telly in the sitting room—the news at first, but of course the top story is the Bart’s murders, and Mrs Hudson quickly changes to a nature programme about insects—and remain there for some time.

After lunch, Sherlock finally comes down and barges in without so much as a precursory knock.

“Good afternoon, Mrs Hudson,” he says, though he spares her barely a glance, giving all of his attention to John. “John, I need you.”

It’s an interesting choice of words and spoken with an unusual amount of intensity. John feels himself begin to flush, reminded suddenly of Sherlock’s bizarre and almost flirtatious comments earlier, which is ridiculous, but thankfully Sherlock doesn’t seem fazed by or even to notice John’s reaction.

“The test we talked about?”

“Yes.”

So John thanks Mrs Hudson for spending time with him, and tells her goodbye, then follows Sherlock back upstairs.

“Mycroft’s assistant will be here shortly,” Sherlock says as he closes the door to the flat behind them. The broken sliding door bolt rattles with the motion. “I’d prefer to prepare the samples myself, even if I can’t be the one to analyse them.”

“Samples, plural?”

“Yes. Blood and urine.” Sherlock gives John a look as though daring him to comment on the issue, but John hadn’t even considered it. Sherlock was a thorough investigator; of course he’d want to test both.

“Right. Where’s the cup? I’ll get you the urine sample.”

Sherlock goes to the kitchen and picks up a plastic specimen container from the table, which he offers to John. John takes it and heads to the loo.

When he finishes, he finds Sherlock waiting for him immediately outside the door, holding an empty syringe, a tourniquet, and a vacuum tube.

“Do I even want to know why you have syringes already in the flat?” John asks, handing over his urine sample.

“Not for the reasons you’re thinking,” Sherlock says, but volunteers nothing about what his reasons might be, just manhandles John back into the loo and onto the closed toilet lid. “Easier just to do it here, since the antiseptic and first aid supplies are close by.”

“I could do it myself, you know. I am actually a trained medical professional.”

Sherlock doesn’t respond, too busy digging through the medicine cabinet and setting out the antiseptic and first aid supplies along the edge of the sink.

“Did you ask your brother about the cameras?”

Sherlock grunts, his expression turning sour, which is as good as verbal assent, though obviously he isn’t convinced. John isn’t surprised; of course it sounds absolutely loony to someone who hasn’t witnessed the thing first-hand.

When it’s time to actually take John’s blood, Sherlock kneels down on the floor in front of him, long fingers probing the inside of John’s elbow for a good vein. The position, the skin-to-skin contact, Sherlock’s intense expression, the whole thing is so odd it rivals Sherlock stroking John’s hair for the oddest thing Sherlock has ever done in John’s presence.

John doesn’t know where he’s supposed to look. The sight of Sherlock’s hand on John’s arm makes him feel peculiar, the loo isn’t the most interesting scenery, so he finds himself staring at Sherlock’s bowed head, which is when he realises something.

“Your hair….”

“Dyed,” says Sherlock, as he reaches for the syringe. “It had been blond, but I dyed it back to its natural shade—or as close as I could get—before I returned. From a distance, it looks the same, but up close and in the right light, you can obviously see that the colour lacks the more subtle highlights of my natural hair.”

John isn’t sure what’s more surprising, listening to Sherlock talk about the “subtle highlights” of his hair colour or hearing him admit to caring enough about his appearance to re-dye his hair to its natural colour, when it surely would have been simpler just to keep it blond until it grew out.

“You… dyed your hair back before you returned,” he echoes.

Sherlock huffs, then John feels the prick of the needle sliding beneath his skin. “I thought you’d prefer it if I looked as close as possible to how you remembered me. Of course, I couldn’t do anything about the length, which is quite unfortunate. I’d been looking forward to categorising all the ways you can knot your fingers in it, and shorter hair obviously doesn’t hold the same possibilities that longer hair does.”

Sherlock leans back, slipping the needle from John’s vein, as John struggles to process that admission. All he can come up with in response, however, is “You… what?” which makes Sherlock roll his eyes with another dissatisfied huff.

“Is this another effect that my ‘death’ has had on you? I swear you didn’t use to be this oblivious and obtuse. Yesterday I expressed the depth of my regard for you multiple times, which you didn’t acknowledge, I assume because you were still in a strop—understandable, of course, given my… my actions. Then, this morning, when it seemed you had decided to forgive me, I threw myself at you, which you seemed puzzled by—”

“ _That_ was you throwing yourself at me?” John says, baffled by the thought. “And when on earth did you express any sort of regard for me?”

“It was _dull_ without you.” Sherlock isn’t looking him in the face any longer, is instead focusing on the task of putting away the antiseptic and binning the used syringe now that John’s blood is taken, but his voice is particularly emphatic, almost what John would call passionate if it had been anyone else speaking. “Not a day passed where I didn’t regret not taking you with me, despite the danger, and when I realised you’d become the murderer’s next target, that even Mycroft was struggling to apprehend him and could not guarantee your absolute safety, I couldn’t return to London fast enough. Surely all of that says something about how fond I am of you.”

“You never said any of that!” John says. His voice comes out as more of a shout than he means, and he lowers it quickly when Sherlock flinches. “You didn’t even _imply_ most of it.”

“Fine, all right. Perhaps I was too subtle, but you understand now. What’s your response?”

That it’s too quick, John thinks about saying. A matter of days ago, he had thought Sherlock was dead, and now there’s a murderer after him—quite possibly a paranormal one—and a confession of romantic interest is quite a lot to throw on a man in these circumstances. But he can’t say that. He doesn’t know why, but he just can’t.

Instead, John says, “I’m still angry at you. In fact, I’m not sure I’ll ever really be able to trust you again. I’ve just decided to… set all that aside for the moment. Also, you realise you’re propositioning me while you suspect I’m under the effects of a hallucinogenic drug.”

Sherlock, moodily unwrapping a plaster for the pinprick on John’s arm, freezes at the statement. Then, after a moment, he nods solemnly. “Not good,” he mutters. “Very not good.”

Sherlock kneels down in front of John again, grabs his arm, and holds it still while he places the plaster over the blood beading from the tiny wound on John’s skin. Once it has been sufficiently secured, he sits back on his haunches, still holding John’s arm, and peers into John’s face.

John can see the moment that some new thought occurs, because Sherlock’s face suddenly goes slack, eyes wide with surprise and something like awe.

“Oh,” Sherlock breathes, and then he’s reaching for John’s neck, thumb pressing firmly on John’s pulse point. “Quickened pulse and respiration, dilated eyes—John, you’re aroused. Faintly, of course, but…. How long? And why? The circumstances, physical proximity, the conversation, what?”

John is, he realises. It feels a bit like simple nervousness on the surface, but it has a clear undercurrent of excitement. An isolated incident, he wonders, or…?

“Probably the image of my hands knotted in your hair, actually,” he says. It’s meant to be a joke, he intends there to be humour in his tone, but it doesn’t come out like that at all. Instead, he sounds as hungry as Sherlock looks, and then Sherlock fairly launches himself forward, between John’s knees which spread wider to accommodate him.

“Just a bit,” Sherlock murmurs, his face only an inch from John’s, his eyes dark. “Just a bit, yes?”

Then they’re kissing, both of Sherlock’s hands clawing at his nape like he’s trying to dig his way inside, and John feels helpless—the good kind of helpless, the kind he always felt when he used to chase after Sherlock, trusting that Sherlock knows where they’re going and what they’re after.

John grabs for Sherlock as well, gets his fingers as tangled in Sherlock’s short hair as possible, and kisses back.

*

By the time Mycroft’s assistant arrives for the samples, which can’t be more than five minutes later, John is somewhat more than faintly aroused, and convinced they should have been doing this all along, kissing enthusiastically and making Sherlock’s hair look an absolute mess.

From their appearances, there’s no doubt they’ve been snogging like teenagers, but Anthea—who is clearly the woman who shows up at their flat, although her hair is cut differently and is now a light shade of auburn—doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at them. She takes the blood and urine from Sherlock with a blank expression and says, “Your brother will text you the results,” then spins on her heels and leaves.

“It won’t take long,” Sherlock says as he closes the door behind her. “Well, perhaps an hour or two at the most, but it could be worse.”

John wonders why it sounds like Sherlock is trying to reassure John—or perhaps himself—but then he catches on. Sherlock is waiting for confirmation that John isn’t in fact drugged before he does anything, well, more drastic than a snog.

“I’m still angry at you,” John reminds him. As he speaks, he feels the emotion rising back up and stubbornly shoves it down. That’s one skill he gained from the war: he’s fantastic at compartmentalising.

“Yes, you’ve said. And that’s fine. It clearly hasn’t stopped you from wanting me or caring about me. I can work with that. You’ll see.”

“Fine. Have you thought about what it’ll mean if I’m _not_ drugged?” John asks. Since Sherlock seems more keen to pace around the room than throw himself at John again, John decides to sit on the sofa.

“Of course.” Sherlock sighs, seeming almost offended by the question. “Haven’t you been listening to me? I’ve told you. You’re sleep-deprived and stressed. Do you even realise how tense you are? You’re holding yourself like you expect to be attacked at any moment.”

“So I’m hallucinating because I need to relax?” John says wryly.

“Mm. Well, I’m told a good orgasm or five can do wonders to relax a person, so either way you’re lucky I’m here to assist you.”

“You’re told?” John echoes, and Sherlock stops pacing to raise an eyebrow at him as though to say _Yes and?_ And, well, that’s an interesting thought. John hadn’t given much consideration—perhaps had subconsciously avoided it?—to the possibility that Mycroft had been correct about Sherlock’s lack of sexual experience.

Yes, that’s an interesting thought indeed.

“John,” Sherlock snaps. John can only imagine what his own face looks like, what his body language is saying, if it’s making Sherlock stare at him with such a look of desperate desire. “I’m trying to be good. Don’t be so tempting.”

“Okay,” John agrees. “Um. Maybe Mrs Hudson would like more company?”

“Fine.”

Hours pass, and although John’s arousal quickly fades once they’re out of 221B, Sherlock’s evidently doesn’t. Mrs Hudson seems outright alarmed by the number of times he growls at his phone and grumbles, “How long does such a simple analysis _take_?”

“What on earth is he on about?” Mrs Hudson asks John, and John, well, what is he to say to that?

“It’s complicated,” he decides on, which seems to do it. Mrs Hudson shrugs and goes off to make more tea.

“It’s the not knowing,” Sherlock tells him quietly, shoving his phone back in his pocket and pouting at the ceiling. “I can’t stand not knowing.”

Finally, Sherlock’s phone vibrates with an incoming text, and he whips it out and glances at the screen.

“Mrs Hudson,” he says, standing and motioning for John to stand as well, “I’m afraid we have to be off to our own flat now. John needs to relax quite badly, and if I’m not choking on his penis in the next ten minutes, I might go mad.”

“ _Sherlock_ ,” John hisses, utterly mortified, but Mrs Hudson seems only mildly taken aback.

“Oh! Of course, dear, I know how these things are….”

When they get back to their flat, John fully expects to be shagged against the door, Sherlock seems so frantic, but instead John is shoved insistently toward Sherlock’s bedroom.

“My bed,” Sherlock tells him. “I want to be able to smell you on the sheets afterward.”

“You know,” says John, as Sherlock practically tears the clothes from him, far from the slow seductive stripping that John usually prefers. Although, he finds, watching Sherlock begin to tear faster as his face gets more hungry and desperate, this has its appeal too. “There’s still a murderer out there, I’m not drugged, and I still say it isn’t human.”

“Yes, well, we can’t do anything about it now, can we?” With John’s shirt off, trousers undone and pushed down to his hips, revealing his pants beneath, Sherlock backs away and starts to undress himself. He waves John away when John tries to help. “So we can either lie around and wait for others to do their jobs and worry, or you can _cooperate_ , John, for goodness sake, I can manage more efficiently on my own.”

So John sits on the bed, kicks off his trousers, pants, and socks, and scoots backward, watching as each article of clothing removed bares even more of Sherlock’s smooth, pale skin. John’s never seen so much skin positively begging to be bitten and bruised; he’s practically drooling with the need to mark him. But when he reaches for Sherlock to pull him closer and do just that, Sherlock again waves away his hands, scrunching up his face as though he’s personally offended by the attempt, and kneels on the mattress between John’s spread legs.

John shouldn’t be surprised, he thinks. Sherlock’s arrogant and controlling in every other aspect of his life, so why not sex as well? The thought makes him shiver pleasantly.

“Do you need foreplay?” asks Sherlock, studying John’s cock, which is still only half hard.

“Er.” It would be nice of course, especially for their first time, but then Sherlock licks his own hand and closes it around John’s cock, squeezing it gently and then giving it a few tentative strokes. “Oh god,” John groans instead, dropping his shoulders back against the bed, feeling his prick continue to swell in Sherlock’s grip.

“Apparently not,” Sherlock decides, and without any further ado, flops onto his stomach and sucks John into his mouth.

It’s painfully obvious that he’s inexperienced. He seems to gag more than he doesn’t, and he has no particular rhythm or routine. Rather, Sherlock throws himself into the act the same way he does any new experience, settling for no less than _everything_ and _right now._ He cycles between licking up and down the shaft, sucking at the tip, and trying to bob his head, eyes squeezed shut and face pinched like he’s entirely lost.

“Slow down,” John tries to coax him, panting, stroking Sherlock’s short hair soothingly with his fingertips. In response, Sherlock cracks his eyes open and pulls off with a wet slurp that makes John drop back to the bed, fist his hands in Sherlock’s hair, and cry, “Oh god, Sherlock.”

Then Sherlock’s drooling all over, making sure every movement of his lips on John’s cock makes a filthy, filthy sound, and John shakes and squirms and tugs at Sherlock’s hair. Softly, afraid of hurting him at first, and then ruthlessly when every pull makes Sherlock groan low in his throat.

John’s orgasm creeps up on him. One moment he’s enjoying what is doubtlessly the sloppiest, hottest blowjob he’s ever had, and the next he’s positively writhing beneath Sherlock’s wet, hungry mouth and crying, “Oh, oh. Please, oh,” as he fills it with come.

It’s not until Sherlock pulls off with a faint scowl that John remembers his manners, recalls that any considerate man should warn his partner beforehand that he’s going to come, and he’s horrified at himself for forgetting.

“Oh Christ,” he says. “Sherlock, I’m sorry. That was—”

“I wanted to come like that,” Sherlock complains, looking very put out. “With my mouth on you.”

“Er—sorry?”

With a huff of annoyance, Sherlock slides his palms beneath John’s thighs and rather unceremoniously shoves them up toward John’s chest, then sets out to absolutely _devour_ John’s arsehole.

Not the sort of thing John’s prepared for, really, particularly not when he isn’t freshly showered, but it feels… surprisingly good. His cock gives a twitch, and a soft little “oh” finds its way out of his open mouth.

But he’s not young anymore and can’t hold the position for long before his legs begin to stiffen and ache. When he tells Sherlock, he quickly finds himself on his stomach, Sherlock’s insistent hands tilting his hips up so he can taste John from behind.

It feels filthy and sluttish, Sherlock’s tongue opening him up and getting him wet, Sherlock groaning like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted, John hissing “fuck, fuck” and reaching behind to grab at Sherlock’s hair again, using his grip to hold Sherlock’s head steady while he rocks backward onto Sherlock’s tongue.

By the time that Sherlock’s right hand abandons John’s hip to touch himself—John knows because he can feel the mattress shake with each of Sherlock’s thrusts, feel Sherlock’s groans take on a particularly needy edge—John’s thoughts are sluggish and dirty. He thinks about begging Sherlock just to put it in already, to open him up more with his cock and just use him properly.

All he manages, though, is to sigh, “Do it, Sherlock. Just do it,” and Sherlock’s left hand grips him painfully as he gasps against John’s hole and comes.

For several minutes, there is just the sound of Sherlock panting and moaning weakly, his breath warming John’s cool, wet skin. John slowly comes back to himself, and is very, very relieved he hadn’t actually told Sherlock to “put it in already,” although what he had said was probably bad enough.

“That was better than I thought it would be,” Sherlock says eventually, sounding surprised.

John laughs, feeling limp and floaty and more than a little giddy. “Nice, very nice, Sherlock. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten such a high compliment. Now get off me so I can turn over.”

*

They shag twice more later that night, both times in the bed and both times because Sherlock declares he wants his mouth on John’s cock again.

The last time, Sherlock is fresh from the shower, hair still wet and dripping, and John feels oversensitive and almost chafed from all the attention. His legs are slung over Sherlock’s shoulders, heels digging into Sherlock’s back, and the sounds coming from his mouth should be mortifying—he sounds more like he’s having a good cry, not getting his prick sucked—but Sherlock’s moans have turned to helpless little whimpers, like he’s in the same place as John is, which makes John feel better. More than better, really, it makes John feel spectacular.

When John comes, which takes ages—Sherlock’s jaw must be impossibly sore—it feels like more of a relief than anything, and exhaustion descends almost instantly, making his arms feel leaden when he reaches for Sherlock, tries to pull him up so John can have a go at him.

“Shh,” Sherlock says, kissing his breastbone, then his chin. “Sleep. We’ll deal with everything in the morning.”

John’s protests come out more as drowsy, nonsensical murmurings, so he gives in and lets himself drift off, feeling Sherlock stroking his hair, the motion only a little less wooden this time.

*

John wakes up some time later to the sound of tree leaves rustling in the wind and the feel of a cold breeze on his face. It takes him a moment of battling through the haze of sleep in his brain to realise Sherlock hasn’t simply opened a window while John has been sleeping.

He’s fully dressed, for one, when he distinctly remembers falling asleep post-blowjob and without a stitch of clothing. He’s also lying on a surface that’s too hard and lumpy to be Sherlock’s mattress.

John cracks his eyes open and finds that he’s in the reclined passenger seat of a car. The windscreen and windows are fogged, but the door beside him is ajar, revealing a patch of tall grass just outside and, beyond it, row after row of tall, dark trees.

There’s no driver—or Sherlock—in sight.


	5. Moriarty Was Real

It’s incomprehensible, John thinks, that someone could have clothed him and transported him… wherever this is, while he’d been merely asleep, but there is no post-sedative cloud in his mind, no headache, no strange taste in his mouth.

And, well, _Slender Man_ , he reminds himself. Everything about this situation is already incomprehensible.

The fog on the windows has begun to dissipate—and how had it got there to begin with? he wonders—and the moon overhead provides enough light for him to see that he’s in a forest, that the car is parked facing a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and that there is no one else in sight.

“Sherlock?” he calls, though his voice comes out croaky and weak. He clears his throat and tries again. “Sherlock?”

No response, although he hadn’t really been expecting one.

John takes deep breaths, forcing the burgeoning fear and panic down. His best chance of surviving this, whatever _thi_ s is, is to remain calm and rational. So, after checking his pockets, which are empty, he squares his shoulders and takes a good look at the car’s interior for anything that might be of use to him.

A key is in the ignition, he sees, and he curses himself for not realising before. He could have been driving himself out of here by now. Except that when he turns the key, nothing happens. The car doesn’t rumble to life; none of the interior lights or indicators even flicker.

“Fuck,” he sighs. He surveys the rest of the car’s interior, feeling around the floor of the backseat and opening the glove box, before he reaches over to the driver’s side and presses the button that will open the bonnet. Then he climbs out to have a look.

He’s never been keen on cars and consequently knows little about them, but he knows enough to be able to tell that this one—which seems to be a Volkswagen model from the 1980s—has been gutted of all its essential parts. And John knows enough about cars to know that one without an engine won’t be going anywhere.

“Fuck,” he sighs again, stepping back and crossing his arms for warmth.

It’s positively freezing, and John’s abductor has given him only a dark cable-knit jumper, no shirt beneath, pants, jeans, socks, and a pair of boots. A thick coat and maybe a pair of gloves would’ve been nice, he thinks, shivering as a particularly biting wind sweeps through the trees.

He surveys his surroundings again, eyeing the maze of trees, the fence, and the grass beneath his feet.

“Blue moor-grass?” he mumbles to himself. Has he been taken where Victor Trevor had been when he was killed? It’s not a pleasant thought, of course, so he tries to put it out of his mind for the moment.

He opens the boot of the car, finds it empty, and slams it shut with another curse.

There’s no point in staying with the car if it doesn’t run, so after retrieving the key from the ignition—not the best of weapons, obviously, but if he slots it between two fingers he could do quite a bit more damage with his fist—he considers his options. The fence is tall, easily twelve feet, and topped with three rows of barbed wire surrounded by a spiral of even more. Trying to climb it is clearly not advisable, although John thinks if he were motivated enough he might still have the strength, discipline, and pain tolerance to do so. But he sees nothing beyond it aside from more forest and grass, so he turns away from the fence and the car and starts walking.

After only a few steps, he finds a path, a place between the trees where the grass is worn away, and he decides to follow it.

Aside from the wind, the forest is utterly silent. Eerily so, although, considering it is early January, John supposes he shouldn’t have expected it to be otherwise; birds and insects are gone, animals are hibernating, and much of the flora is dead.

Keeping his arms wrapped around himself, occasionally rubbing for warmth, John thinks about Sherlock. His bloody brilliant mind, his deep and magnificent voice, his pale and thin and lovely body, hair that John could grab and pull all day. He hopes that Sherlock is worrying himself sick over John’s absence, and that he’s hard at work pinpointing John’s exact location and preparing to swoop in like the dashing hero of some outlandish adventure and save him.

John hasn’t even got to properly touch Sherlock. Slender Man or no, he can’t die yet, certainly not like this.

But, of course, the chances of Sherlock coming for him are slim. The only hint of location Sherlock has is the grass seeds from Victor Trevor’s shoe, and “Northern England” is very, very broad. For that matter, is John even _in_ Northern England? Wooded areas, especially as large as the one he seems to be traversing—which looks, to be honest, more like the set of some sort of horror film than the sort of woods John would ever expect to encounter in real life—are not exactly common in England, as far as he knows.

He’s been taking care to step lightly, to make as little noise as possible in the silent forest, so when there’s a sharp _crack_ like a branch being stepped on, followed by a rustle of grass, he knows it isn’t him.

He spins in a circle, peering into the trees and up and down the path he’s walking, but he sees nothing, neither movement nor an out-of-place shape. Still, another _crack_ comes from somewhere in the trees to his left, accompanied by more rustling, this time in a familiar step-step-step rhythm that means someone is walking through the grass.

Heart beginning to pound, senses sharpening at the approach of probable danger, John quickens his pace to a jog that he should, unless he’s more out of shape than he realises, be able to sustain for a good period of time. After all, he’s being toyed with—stalked, as Slender Man supposedly likes to do—not outright chased; this might go on for a while.

The jogging has the added benefit of warming him, and after a few minutes John hardly even notices the cold any longer. He slows to a brisk walk, listening over the sound of his own pulse and his harsh breathing for any indication that he’s still being followed, but the woods are silent again, no footsteps or snapped branches.

As he’s surveying the area around him, he notices a lightly coloured mass in the distance, up the path a bit and nestled deep in the trees to the right. Curiosity bids him to investigate, so he does.

When John’s a bit closer, he discovers it’s an off-white lorry parked between two hulking trees with thick, twisted trunks. He sprints the rest of the way to it, trying not to let himself get his hopes up, in case it ends up being as useless as the car, but unable to stop himself from feeling a small wave of relief at the sight.

The lorry’s doors are locked, so John tugs the sleeve of his jumper down over his fist, intending to punch through the window and unlock the door that way.

Before he can, however, he notices there’s something on the windscreen. A small piece of paper, it seems, trapped beneath the wiper blades. John leans forward and slips it free, then raises it until he can see it more easily in the moonlight.

_HELP ME_ , the note reads, and the second word has been underlined multiple times. There’s no accompanying sketch.

“Don’t you think the notes are getting a bit old, mate?” John mutters, low enough that his voice is barely audible at all. Really, there is such a thing as going overboard, and the notes are pushing it now. He slips the paper back under the windscreen wiper and returns to the task of breaking the lorry’s driver-side window.

But when he turns, Slender Man is there, looming over him.

John startles backward, ramming his lower back painfully into the side of the lorry, swallowing a shout—he won’t give the thing the satisfaction—and Slender Man takes a casual step towards him, its long arm reaching for him.

John ducks and runs, crashing through the trees back to the dirt path. This time, though, Slender Man gives chase. John can hear it follow—can _feel_ it, even, movement of air on his nape like the thing is nearly close enough to grab him.

He veers off the path and into the trees on the opposite side. Darker there, he thinks, more obstacles and less open space. But he nearly runs straight into Slender Man, who is suddenly among the trees, striding towards him at a pace that looks leisurely but is still somehow nearly as quick as John’s run.

Teleportation. Of course, another of its supposed features. Stupid of John to forget.

He can almost hear Sherlock in his head, telling him to “Think, John, _think_! You’re cleverer than this.”

He’s not, though. John’s nowhere near as clever as Sherlock; he just has good instinct.

So John does his best to shut off his brain and engage that instinct. Then he runs. Through the trees, dodging Slender Man every time he appears, tall and faceless, in front of John.

He comes to another—or perhaps the same—dirt path, and he finds himself following it, running so hard that his lungs burn and his legs ache, not allowing himself to so much as slow for a deep breath of air because he can still sense Slender Man following him, keeping pace.

Eventually, he spots another lightly coloured mass in the distance, much, much bigger than the lorry. He hurdles towards it, sees that it is a building, with big white double doors. At the sight, thoughts begin to return to John— _weapons, help, phones, places to hide_ —and he devotes every bit of remaining energy to reaching it before Slender Man does, so that if the doors are locked he isn’t immediately murdered against them.

The doors aren’t locked. They open easily for John, and he bolts inside, scanning the interior as he runs.

And then he skids to a stop. The building is in fact a single room, large but empty; it looks oddly like an indoor swimming pool but without the actual pool. There’s even the faint smell of chlorine in the air. The double doors John entered through seem to be the only entrance or exit; the other three walls are bare.

A dead end.

“Fuck,” John says, sucking in desperate breaths of air to soothe the burning in his chest. His legs begin to tremble in exhaustion, but he has to carry on. If he’s quick enough, he can dodge Slender Man—whose footsteps he can hear on the floor behind him—and make his way back outside.

Just in case, John quickly checks that he still has the key from the car and clenches it in his fist, the metal teeth protruding from between his index and middle fingers, then whirls around, prepared to sprint.

He doesn’t even make it half a step before he’s startled to a stop. In part because he sees the double doors are gone, replaced by a smooth white wall identical to the other three. But also because the figure standing several feet behind him, in a black suit and red tie, is shorter than it had been previously and has a distinct face—one which is quite familiar, in fact.

“ _You_ ,” John gasps.

“Me!” says Jim Moriarty, spreading his arms with a twisted grin. “Quite a turn-up, isn’t it, John? Do you like the clothes? I was going to leave you as I found you, but….” He raises his shoulders and squints in distaste. “Well, your death is going to be rather public, I’m afraid, and I didn’t want it to be _too_ undignified.”

“That’s—You’re dead.” John backs up, sweeping his gaze around the room again, looking for any possible exit, but there is none.

“Hmm.” Moriarty drops his grin and instead scrunches his face up into an expression of exaggerated thoughtfulness. “That _is_ a conundrum, isn’t it? And until a few days ago, wasn’t Sherlock dead too?”

“So he was right all along,” John says. He’s still panting from the run, sweating now too, and the shaking in his legs is getting worse as he stands. “There was no Slender Man, just you.”

“Oh, don’t sell yourself short, darling,” Moriarty answers with a mock pout. “You were more right than you realise. Who knew that Sherlock could be so _boring_? You at least managed to open your pretty eyes and _see_.” Putting his hands in his pockets, he cocks his head to one side and eyes John’s hand, which is still clutching the key. “And put that down, would you, dear. It won’t do you any good.”

John doesn’t intend to comply, of course, but the metal is suddenly so hot it’s scalding. He drops the key with a yelp of pain, and it falls to the floor, which ripples like the surface of a vat of thick paint and then swallows the key right up. John stares, astounded.

With a low chuckle, Moriarty ambles closer, bowing his head so he can peer almost coyly at John through his eyelashes. “Impressive, isn’t it? Dying was the best idea I’ve ever had. Being alive was never like this.”

“Like this?” John echoes, stepping away to compensate for each step Moriarty takes towards him.

“Mm. A _thought_.” Moriarty grins gleefully, sliding his hands from his pockets to gesture at himself for emphasis. “An _idea_. And, honey, you should see all the new tricks I have up my sleeves.”

As though demonstrating, Moriarty wriggles his fingers and drops his arms to his sides. Then, after a moment, black begins to pour from the sleeves of his suit jacket. It looks like smoke or sand, and it covers Moriarty’s hands and forms several thin, wispy tendrils that curl at the end like tentacles.

It might be the most disturbing thing John has ever seen in his life, worse even than any of the horrors he experienced during the war, and he wants to be away from it. He lunges around Moriarty, but of course there’s nowhere to run. Still, he makes it about halfway across the room before he’s stopped by Moriarty appearing in front of him, grinning maniacally, the wispy tentacles now fully formed and writhing at his sides.

“Yes, I quite agree,” he says. “We’ve talked enough, and time unfortunately is running short.”

One of the tentacles uncurls in John’s direction, and John tries to back away from it, but finds himself backing into a wall instead, at the far end of the room instead of the halfway point where he’d been standing not two seconds earlier.

“Clever boy,” Moriarty coos at him. “You don’t want one of these to touch you. Not very pleasant, you understand—for you, that is. It doesn’t really matter to me, although I _would_ prefer to keep you… unharmed for the moment. Don’t want to ruin the finale, do we?”

John realises he won’t make it out of this, and feels his heart drop to his stomach at the thought. Scotland Yard will find him on the pavement by Bart’s, and Sherlock will see his body, perhaps mangled almost beyond recognition, and think that he failed John. It will hurt him perhaps worse than anything has ever hurt Sherlock Holmes, and there is nothing that John can do about it.

Still, he squares his shoulders and widens his stance, making sure to keep his chin up and his eyes on Moriarty, to show he won’t roll over and bare his throat, not yet.

At the sight, Moriarty’s maniacal grin turns positively sinister. “Mm, and this must be why Sherlock is so fond of you. You’re not like the rest of them, are you, John. Such a brave little soldier, no blubbering and pleading… but you want to go home, don’t you? Of course you do—you’re not _that_ different. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to close your eyes, click your little heels together, and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’ Just like Dorothy. And then I’ll take you home.”

John spits in his face. It’s the best alternative to punching him that John can think of. But Moriarty’s smile doesn’t waver at the gesture, and after only a second the spit vanishes from his skin like it was never there to begin with.

“Cute. But either you cooperate and Sherlock finds your corpse more or less intact,” Moriarty says. “Or you misbehave again and Sherlock finds your corpse in pieces.” He raises one arm, one tentacle, threateningly. “Which do you think Sherlock would prefer?”

John grits his teeth at the reminder of Sherlock, at the image that springs to mind of Sherlock on his knees in the loo, thumb over John’s pulse and staring at him in awe.

John closes his eyes and practically snarls the words: “There’s no place like home.”

“I don’t see your little heels clicking, my dear.”

After a deep breath, John clicks them, three times, just like Dorothy, and repeats, “There’s no place like home.”

John feels the change instantly. There’s a cold wind on his face and the sounds of traffic in the distance. Opening his eyes, he finds himself on the roof of a building—Bart’s, of course. He knows it even before he surveys his surroundings more closely to verify it. The sky is still mostly dark, although he can see the very, very beginnings of light in the east.

Moriarty is still in front of him, now standing close enough that John can feel his breath on his face. Behind him, somewhere, although John can’t see it now, is the door. If John could get to it, if he could get down to the rest of the hospital or at least make enough of a commotion to alert someone—

But no, he thinks; this Moriarty can teleport and manipulate reality. If John tries to run, he will either find the door has disappeared, or he will be killed before he can reach it.

“Good boy,” Moriarty says. “Just a few minutes more, and it’ll all be over.”

To their left, up against the edge of the roof, is a pile of bodies. Three, John thinks, although it’s hard to tell with the state that they’re in. It’s like someone has tried to twist them into pretzels; their limbs are bent in impossible positions, bones protruding from their ruptured skin, clothes in rags.

“Police officers,” Moriarty says, glancing at them. “You’d think Scotland Yard would have learned after the first batch, wouldn’t you? Hmm. Maybe I’ll leave these bodies for them to find. Do you think they’ll understand then?”

He raises his eyebrows as though inviting John’s response, but then he pauses, tilts his head slightly, and squints like he’s listening to a distant noise that’s inaudible to John. “Ah,” he says with a smile, stepping to the side, revealing the door in the process, “finally.”

The door bangs open, and Sherlock rushes through, John’s Sig in his hand, his eyes almost glowing wildly as they flick between John, his muscles rigid and stance defensive, and Moriarty, standing beside him and grinning delightedly.

“No,” John groans, finally understanding what Moriarty has planned. He’s going to kill John while Sherlock watches—and then maybe kill Sherlock too. “No, no, no.”

“You all right?” Sherlock asks him. There’s a look in his eye that John recognises immediately. _Keep still_ , it says; _leave this entirely to me._

“Run, Sherlock,” John tries to tell him, but Moriarty interrupts to say, “He’s had better days, I’m sure, but he’s still mostly unharmed. Well, for the moment, anyway.”

Sherlock peers at Moriarty, taking in both his presence and the black tentacles writhing where his hands should be, with only a look of mild surprise. He’d been expecting to find a scene like this, John thinks, and of course Moriarty realises it as well.

“Figured it out, have you?” he asks, and Sherlock, after glancing again at John, nods slowly. “Off you go then. Let’s have one more deduction before John here has to say goodbye for the night. _Ah_ , no, Sherlock.”

Sherlock has shifted just slightly, and now Moriarty’s tentacle hovers beside John’s head. A warning: he could crush John’s skull in a second. With a faintly ill look, Sherlock remains where he is and answers. “I woke at midnight and the flat was empty. Mycroft was already on his way—the surveillance equipment had gone out for less than ten seconds, during which time John had disappeared. Unless I was drugged, which I was not, I should have woken when he was taken, and a… normal abduction could not have taken so little time.”

“Very good,” Moriarty murmurs. “What then?”

“I realised there might have been some merit to what John had suggested.” Sherlock’s eyes find John’s, and there’s an apology in them. Perhaps the first genuine apology John has ever got from Sherlock, and it’s not even verbal. “I eliminated the impossible, and what remained—although highly, _highly_ improbable—must have been the truth. I looked over the pictures John had taken, of the mural, and saw that he’d missed something.”

“Which was?”

As Moriarty says it, the tentacle beside John’s head freezes mid-writhe and begins to dissipate in the air like smoke, followed by the ones on his other arm. John blinks at the sight and sees that Moriarty is doing the same, staring at his own arm, his slowly reappearing hand, with faint surprise.

Sherlock, however, pays it little attention. “He fixated on only one aspect of the graffiti—‘I believe in Sherlock Holmes’—and ignored the other, more important one—‘Moriarty was real.’ Thousands of people believing in Sherlock Holmes would not have spawned a supernatural entity that kills to get my attention. Thousands of people believing in the existence of Jim Moriarty... might have. And now here you are.”

That seems to distract Moriarty temporarily from the issue of his hand, since he hums pleasantly at the last sentence. “Here I am,” he agrees.

“And now I”—Sherlock cocks the gun and aims it at the centre of Moriarty’s chest—“am going to send you back wherever you came from.”

Moriarty laughs, derision dripping from the sound. “How? By shooting me, killing me? Humans can be killed, Sherlock. But ideas can’t.”

“Can’t they?” Sherlock asks, in a tone that clearly says _Of course they can_. “I rather think I’ve done a fairly good job of it already.”

He nods toward Moriarty’s plain, human-looking hands, and the already freezing air seems to get colder.

“Sherlock,” Moriarty says, his pitch rising until he’s shouting, “what did you _do_?”

“Updated my website and John’s blog to say that I am in fact alive and a fraud,” Sherlock answers, wearing a tiny little smirk, “and that Jim Moriarty never existed. Then I emailed the links to the administrators of all the top Sherlock Holmes fan sites and communities. Then I contacted the editor-in-chief of _The Guardian_ and told her the same. My brother is, as we speak, contacting international news agencies and media companies, and flooding social media sites with the information. And Detective Inspector Lestrade is working to have all the murals in London painted over as soon as possible.”

“And yet,” says Moriarty, gesturing up and down himself, “I’m still here.”

But he doesn’t look as confident as he had before, and Sherlock must notice it as well, since his smirk grows. “Well, it’s still early in London yet,” Sherlock says, lifting his chin to indicate the still-dark sky, although the light in the east has gotten brighter. “Of course, in the western parts of America, it’s still only evening, so… the news should have reached at least a few hundred people by now, likely more. It seems to have made a difference.”

“You can’t convince everyone,” Moriarty tells him. His smile is beginning to look increasingly wan. “No matter what you do, there will still be people—”

Sherlock fires the gun. The bullet strikes Moriarty in the upper portion of his chest, just beneath his throat, and the force of the impact makes him stumble backwards several paces, until he’s only a few feet from the edge of the roof.

“Of course there will,” Sherlock agrees. “But not enough for a Tulpa, I think you’ll find.”

Moriarty stares down, shocked, at where the bullet has passed straight through him, leaving a strange and bloodless hole in its wake. John begins to smell the faint but distinct scent of rotting flesh.

John moves without thinking, while Moriarty is still stunned—and considerably weakened, if Sherlock is right, as he usually is—and launches himself forward so he can drive Moriarty backwards and over the edge of the roof. With a surprised shout, Moriarty grabs at him, gets a fistful of John’s jumper, and tries to take John with him.

He might have succeeded, except that suddenly Sherlock is there, arms clutching him tightly, keeping his feet securely on the roof. The fabric of John’s jumper rips in Moriarty’s fist, and then Moriarty is gone.

When the danger is past, Sherlock moves so that John is cradled against him, huddled in the warmth of his coat and his body. He leans slightly so he can peer over the edge, and John follows his example. On the pavement below, Moriarty’s body lies on its back, not moving. Passersby on the street rush closer to investigate, and Sherlock yanks himself and John back before they glance up and spot them.

“Come on,” Sherlock says, standing and tugging John with him. “The police should be arriving any moment now. We can’t be discovered here.”

*

According to the news, Moriarty’s body—which had been in the early stages of decomposition when it had been recovered—disappears from the morgue while it is awaiting its autopsy. John is concerned— _disappeared_ does not mean _gone_ , after all, certainly not when the paranormal is involved—but Sherlock merely rolls his eyes.

“I’ve told you, John, it’s done.”

They’re holed up in a flat in Pall Mall, courtesy of Mycroft, until the media frenzy dies down and Scotland Yard stops combing London for them. John sits on one end of a posh leather sofa, and Sherlock is stretched out on his back beside him, reading the morning newspaper, his feet nestled in John’s lap.

“Well, you were wrong about the whole thing before, remember,” John can’t help but remind him, and Sherlock lowers the paper to give John an unimpressed look, then lifts his foot to prod at John’s cheek with his big toe. John laughs, shoving it back down. “Well, you were.”

Sherlock scoffs and lets the newspaper drop to the floor. “Bored,” he whinges. “Bored, bored, _bored_.” He returns John’s sigh of exasperation with one of his own, then rearranges himself so his head is in John’s lap and his feet at the far end of the sofa. “What do you think of paranormal investigating?”

“Er. What?”

“Paranormal investigating, John, keep up. If Tulpas exist, then think of all the possibilities, the phenomena that might have gone unacknowledged for centuries because people are too stupid to investigate it properly.”

John isn’t the slightest bit certain how to respond to that. So he simply combs his fingers through Sherlock’s short hair and answers, “What happened to dismantling Moriarty’s web, trying to undo the damage you’ve just done to your name and reputation?”

Sherlock hums happily at the affection and nuzzles his nose into the fabric of John’s jeans. “Oh, that won’t take long at all. I’ve finally got a reliable lead on Sebastian Moran’s location, and Mycroft’s planting the necessary seeds to make it appear that _he_ was behind the Moriarty farce all along. When that’s done and Moran is dead, my name can be cleared, and we can finally return to Baker Street and carry on.”

John’s not sure it will be all that simple, really, but at the same time, he knows not to doubt Sherlock Holmes—well, not too much, anyway.

Sherlock flips abruptly onto his back and peers up into John’s face, considering. “Can I tell you how I did it now?” he asks. “Or are you going to storm off in a strop again if I try?”

“How you did what?”

“Successfully faked my death. _Obviously_ , John, what else could I be referring to?”

John stares down at him, hand frozen in Sherlock’s hair, and then lets out a bark of laughter, not sure if he’s laughing because he’s really amused or because he doesn’t know what else to do. “Are you serious? Have you been holding on to that this entire time, just waiting for me to cool down enough that I’ll let you show off how stupidly clever you are?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer, just stares up at John, eyebrow cocked as though to say _Yes, problem?_

John thinks about the last six months—how Sherlock jumped off a roof in front of him, let John think he was dead so he could go off on his own and show off, waltzed back into John’s life as though he’d never left it, and now acts like John’s entirely reasonable anger is mere stroppiness—but the fury has cooled to a simmer, barely even that. He suspects it’s tangled now beneath all the thoughts and emotions the whole Slender Man mess has stirred up, and for the moment, John decides he is content to try and set it aside, to let it be.

“Fine,” John sighs. He scoots Sherlock’s head a bit so he can find a more comfortable position on the sofa. He suspects Sherlock won’t be able to stop himself after just the faking-his-death part, that he’ll launch into an explanation of everything he’d done in the six months he was gone. In short, this could take a while. “Let’s hear it then. How’d you do it?”

Sherlock practically beams up at him, and John finds himself smiling back, lightly scratching Sherlock’s scalp as Sherlock begins to talk.


End file.
